The denotational description of programming languages - an introduction

Solutions to the Exercises in an Introduction to Metric Semantics: Operational and Denotational Models for Programming and Speciication Languages

A Modular SOS for ML Concurrency Primitives

Modularity is an important pragmatic aspect of semantic descriptions. In denotational semantics, the issue of modularity has received much attention, and appropriate abstractions have been introduced, so that definitions of semantic functions may be independent of the details of how computations are modelled. In structural operational semantics (SOS), however, this issue has largely been neglec...

Innocent Game Semantics via Intersection Type Assignment Systems

The aim of this work is to correlate two different approaches to the semantics of programming languages: game semantics and intersection type assignment systems (ITAS). Namely, we present an ITAS that provides the description of the semantic interpretation of a typed lambda calculus in a game model based on innocent strategies. Compared to the traditional ITAS used to describe the semantic inte...

Denotational Semantics and Refinement

Denotational descriptions are frequently presented in terms of a sequence of descriptions of programming languages of increasing complexity. We discuss a formal approach to the study of such description sequences in terms of a refinement relation, showing how the informal use made of this approach in tutorial introductions to denotational semantics may be formally justified.

A Calculus for Hardware Description Languages

In efforts to overcome the complexity of the syntax and the lack of formal semantics in conventional hardware description languages (most notably Verilog and VHDL), a number of approaches based on functional languages have been proposed. The merits of functional languages as hardware description languages can be attributed to the fact that basic building blocks for hardware circuits are equival...