Challenges for Formal Semantic Description: Responses from the Main Approaches

摘要

Although there are thousands of programming languages, most of them share common features. This paper reviews some key underlying language concepts and the challenges they present to the task of formally describing language semantics. The responses to these challenges in operational, axiomatic and denotational approaches to semantic description are reviewed. There are interesting overlaps between these responses; similarities are exposed even where accidental notational conventions disguise them so that essential differences can be pinpointed. Depending on the objectives of writing a formal semantic description of a language, one or other approach might be considered the best choice. An argument is made for increasing the use of formal semantics in language design and here it is suggested that the operational approach is the most viable for a complete language description.