Metasoft primer: towards a metalanguage for applied denotational semantics
Metasoft primer: towards a metalanguage for applied denotational semantics
Fully abstract models of programming languages
Fully abstract models of programming languages
A three-valued logic for software specification and validation
Proceedings of the 2nd VDM-Europe Symposium on VDM---The Way Ahead
Three-valued predicates for software specification and validation
Proceedings of the 2nd VDM-Europe Symposium on VDM---The Way Ahead
The RAISE language, method and tools
Proceedings of the 2nd VDM-Europe Symposium on VDM---The Way Ahead
A guided tour of the mathematics of MetaSoft `88
Information Processing Letters
Science of Computer Programming
The Denotational Description of Programming Languages: An Introduction
The Denotational Description of Programming Languages: An Introduction
Denotational Semantics: The Scott-Strachey Approach to Programming Language Theory
Denotational Semantics: The Scott-Strachey Approach to Programming Language Theory
Fundamentals of Algebraic Specification I
Fundamentals of Algebraic Specification I
The Vienna Development Method: The Meta-Language
The Vienna Development Method: The Meta-Language
Domains for Denotational Semantics
Proceedings of the 9th Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
Towards the Semantics of the Definitional Language of MetaSoft
VDM '90 Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of VDM Europe on VDM and Z - Formal Methods in Software Development
A Naive Domain Universe for VDM
VDM '90 Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of VDM Europe on VDM and Z - Formal Methods in Software Development
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This is an essay where the author expresses his views on applied denotational semantics. In the author's opinion, whether a software system has or does not have a sufficiently abstract denotational semantics should be regarded as a pragmatic attribute of the system rather than merely as a mathematical attribute of its description. In a software system with denotational semantics structured programming is feasible and for such systems there is a routine method of developing program-correctness logic. All that may not be the case if denotationality is not ensured. On the other hand, a non-denotational semantics can be always artificially made denotational on the expense of lowering its level of abstraction. This leads to an important pragmatic question: to what extent and in which situations can we sacrifice denotationality and/or abstraction of a semantics? All discussions are carried on an algebraic ground but the paper is not very technical and contains a short introduction to the algebraic theory of denotational semantics. A short conference version of this paper appeared earlier in R.Janicki, W.W.Koczkodaj eds. Computing and Information, Proc. Int. Conf. on Computing and Information, ICCI'89, Toronto, North-Holland 1989. The reported research has been sponsored by the Polish Academy of Sciences under grant CPBP 02.17)