An operational and a denotational semantics are presented for a simple imperative language. The main feature of the language is second order communication: sending and receiving of statements rather than values. The operational semantics is based on a transition system. A complete 1-bounded ultramet-ric space is used in the denotational semantics. In establishing the connection between the two ...

Denotational semantics is the usual mathematical semantics for functional programming languages. It is higher order (H.O.) in the sense that the semantic domain D includes D ! D] as a subdomain. On the other hand, the usual declarative semantics for logic programs is rst order (F.O.) and given by the least Herbrand model. In this paper, we take a restricted kind of H.O. conditional rewriting sy...

We present a paradigm for proving the correctness of compilers for languages with parallelism. The source language is given a denotational semantics as a compositional translation to a higher-order process calculus. The target language is also given a denotational semantics as a compositional translation to the same process calculus. We show the compiler is correct in that it preserves denotati...

In 1969 Dana Scott suggested, [Sco93], that a Tarskian semantics could be given to programming languages by employing ordered structures of a certain kind, now known as domains. One of his key insights was that recursion can be modelled via the least fixpoint of endofunctions on domains. Shortly afterwards Gordon Plotkin, explored this proposal further; among the many results of his landmark pa...

Denotational semantics is a powerful technique to formally define programming languages. However, language constructs are not always orthogonal, so many semantic equations in a definition may have to be aware of unrelated constructs semantics. Current approaches for modularity in this formalism do not address this problem, providing, for this reason, tangled semantic definitions. This paper pro...

We derive two big-step abstract machines, a natural semantics, and the valuation function of a denotational semantics based on the small-step abstract machine for Core Scheme presented by Clinger at PLDI’98. Starting from a functional implementation of this small-step abstract machine, (1) we fuse its transition function with its driver loop, obtaining the functional implementation of a big-ste...

We study the longstanding problem of semantics for input/output (I/O) expressed using side-eeects. Our vehicle is a small higher-order imperative language, with operations for interactive character I/O and based on ML syntax. Unlike previous theories, we present both operational and denotational semantics for I/O eeects. We use a novel labelled transition system that uniformly expresses both ap...

The paper introduces a semantics for definite logic programs expressed in term of SLD-derivations and studies various properties of SLD-derivations by using the above semantics. The semantics of a program is a goal-independent denotation, which can equivalently be specified by a denotational semantics and a transition system. The denotation is proved to be correct, minimal, AND-compositional an...

This paper investigates presheaf models for process calculi with value passing. Denotational semantics in presheaf models are shown to correspond to operational semantics in that bisimulation obtained from open maps is proved to coincide with bisimulation as defined traditionally from the operational semantics. Both “early” and “late” semantics are considered, though the more interesting “late”...

Game semantics has renewed denotational semantics. It offers among other things an attractive classification of programming features, and has brought a bunch of new definability results. In parallel, in the denotational semantics of proof theory, several full completeness results have been shown since the early nineties. In this note, we review the relation between definability and full abstrac...