Comparative Metric Semantics of Programming Languages : Nondeterminism and Recursion Paperback

During the last three decades several different styles of semantics for program­ ming languages have been developed.

This book compares two of them: the operational and the denotational approach.

On the basis of several exam­ ples we show how to define operational and denotational semantic models for programming languages.

Furthermore, we introduce a general technique for comparing various semantic models for a given language.

We focus on different degrees of nondeterminism in programming lan­ guages.

Nondeterminism arises naturally in concurrent languages.

It is also an important concept in specification languages.

In the examples discussed, the degree of non determinism ranges from a choice between two alternatives to a choice between a collection of alternatives indexed by a closed interval of the real numbers.

The former arises in a language with nondeterministic choices.

A real time language with dense choices gives rise to the latter.

We also consider the nondeterministic random assignment and parallel composition, both couched in a simple language.

Besides non determinism our four example languages contain some form of recursion, a key ingredient of programming languages.