The denotational semantics of programming languages
- 1 August 1976
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in Communications of the ACM
- Vol. 19 (8), 437-453
- https://doi.org/10.1145/360303.360308
Abstract
This paper is a tutorial introduction to the theory of programming language semantics developed by D. Scott and C. Strachey. The application of the theory to formal language specification is demonstrated and other applications are surveyed. The first language considered, LOOP, is very elementary and its definition merely introduces the notation and methodology of the approach. Then the semantic concepts of environments, stores, and continuations are introduced to model classes of programming language features and the underlying mathematical theory of computation due to Scott is motivated and outlined. Finally, the paper presents a formal definition of the language GEDANKEN.This publication has 18 references indexed in Scilit:
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