CHAPTER 12
Programming Language Semantics
Contributed by: Sorav Bansal, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
12.1 Introduction
A precise specification of the semantics (meaning) of a programming language is necessary to reason about the correctness of a program written in that language. Further, a compiler requires these language semantics to determine the legal space of transformations for a given input program. For example, consider a simple declaration statement “int x = 0” in an imperative programming language like C—we understand that this statement introduces a new integer variable “x” in the current scope; a memory region is allocated and the variable “x” refers to this memory region; this memory region is initialized with the zero ...
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