Lambda the Ultimate

Can Abstract State Machines Be Useful in Language Theory? Yuri Gurevich; Margus Veanes; Charles Wallace.

The abstract state machine (ASM) is a modern computation model. ASMs and ASM based tools are used in academia and industry, albeit in a modest scale. They allow you to give high-level operational semantics to computer artifacts and to write executable pecifications of software and hardware at the desired abstraction level. In connection to the 2006 conference on Developments in Language Theory, we point out several ways that we believe abstract state machines can be
useful to the DLT community.

I am not sure how useful this might be to LtU readers, but it is a nice introudction to ASMs.

Among the topics discussed are: concurrency, non-determinism, the notion of Universality (e.g., "Turing completenss") and the executability of the ASM notation (i.e., AsmL).