Abstract
The semantics of a programming language describes a relationship between the syntax and the model of computation. It is concerned with the understanding or interpretation of programs written in the language and prediction of the output of such programs. Early efforts in formalizing the syntax date back to 1963 when Naur [34] defined the syntax of Algol 60 using the Backus Naur Form (BNF). Since then, context-free grammars that are similar to BNF have been used extensively to specify the syntax of programming languages. The formal specification of the semantics of programming languages has also been keenly pursued. While academic researchers have shown considerable interest and significant contributions have been made, no well-accepted widely-used technique for semantic specification has emerged. There are several widely used techniques for specifying the formal semantics of programming languages. Some of them are listed below.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Umamageswaran, K., Pandey, S.L., Wilsey, P.A. (1999). Related Work. In: Formal Semantics and Proof Techniques for Optimizing VHDL Models. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5123-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5123-2_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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