Semantics
A programming language specification consists of a syntactic description and a semantic description.
Syntactic description:symbols we can use in a language
Semantic Description: what phrases in a programming language mean.
Semantics may be given as
- Denotational
- Axiomatic
- Operational
We concentrate on axiomatic descriptions: the meaning is defined by a logical calculus called program logic which provides a tool for the derivation of programs and assertions of the form {Q} p {R}