Denotational Semantics

Question 1

What are the elements of a language definition?

Answer 1

• Syntax - set of legal elements
• Semantics - meaning of those elements

Question 2

Semantics is expressed by defining…

Answer 2

• Semantic domain - notation for talking about meaning.
• Semantic mapping - maps the syntactic elements to the semantic domain.

Question 3

Different kinds of semantics use different sorts of semantic domains. What are two examples?

Answer 3

Question 4

Denotational Semantics

Describe syntactic domain.

Answer 4

Elements of the abstract syntax of a language.

Question 5

Denotational Semantics

Describe semantic domain.

Answer 5

Abstract mathematical objects (integers, booleans, lists, functions, etc.).

Question 6

Denotational Semantics

Describe semantic functions.

Answer 6

Map elements of syntactic domain to elements of semantic domain.

Question 7

What are two important features of denotational semantics?

Answer 7

• Based on well-defined mathematical objects (functions).
• It is compositional: The semantics of a language obtained from the semantics of its parts.

Question 8

(T/F) Denotational semantics are used for creating programs.

Answer 8

False.

They are used to develop programming languages.