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2014 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Operational Semantics of Imperative Languages

Author: Maribel Fernández

Publisher: Springer London

Published in: Programming Languages and Operational Semantics

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Abstract

The discussion of programming language features in the previous chapter was informal. However, informal semantic descriptions may be imprecise, as the following example shows.

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Recall that abstract syntax trees are built using the tokens produced by the lexer; see Chap. 1 for more details.

The brackets are not part of the syntax; they are not needed if we draw the two-dimensional tree, but are used to disambiguate the textual syntax: in this example the root of the tree corresponds to the first sequencing operator.

Recall that \(\rightarrow ^*\) denotes the reflexive-transitive closure of \(\rightarrow \), that is, \(\langle E \cdot c, r, m \rangle \rightarrow ^* \langle c,v\cdot r,m' \rangle \) if there are zero or more reduction steps from \(\langle E \cdot c, r, m \rangle \) to \(\langle c,v\cdot r,m' \rangle \).

See Def. 2.22, Chap. 2.

G. Plotkin, A structural approach to operational semantics. Technical Report DAIMI FN-19 (Aarhus University, 1981)

H.R. Nielson, F. Nielson, Semantics with Applications: An Appetizer. Undergraduate topics in computer science (Springer, Berlin, 2007)

A.M. Pitts, Semantics of programming languages, Lecture Notes and Slides (Cambridge University, 2002)

G. Winskel, The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages, Foundations of Computing (MIT Press, 1993)

R. Harper, Practical Foundations for Programming Languages (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013)

A.P. Parkes, Introduction to languages, machines and logic—computable languages, abstract machines and formal logic, Undergraduate topics in computer science (Springer, 2002)

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Title

Operational Semantics of Imperative Languages

Book

Programming Languages and Operational Semantics

Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-6367-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-4471-6368-8

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6368-8

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6368-8_4

Author:

Maribel Fernández

Publisher

Springer London

Sequence number

Chapter number

Chapter 4