A Practical Introduction to Denotational Semantics

Cambridge Computer Science Texts

by Lloyd Allison

The book is brand new and will be shipped from US.

Genres: Mathematics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Tim Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cut my teeth on Scott-Strachey Denotational Semantics, which used little more that Set Theory as its object language. But this book is based on Polymorphic Typed Lambda Calculus, which is actually a richer language than the one I am trying to define! Also, the fact that the meaning of a program is a mathematical object is lost. Semantics as given here merely translates from one programming language to another: it is a compiler. The beauty of the Set Theory formalism is that it provides an escape from computer science to a world where thing are proved rather than executed.

Nevertheless, it is a useful refresher, and it does lay out the notation I require.

This book was written using Pascal and Algol-68 as teaching languages. Younger readers might find that more difficult than I did.

[Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as comprehensive or as rigorous as Stoy. Makes mention of Milner's CCS in the final chapter.