Historical Development
Denotational semantics originated in the work of Christopher Strachey and Dana Scott in the late 1960s. As originally developed by Strachey and Scott, denotational semantics provided the denotation (meaning) of a computer program as a function that mapped input into output. To give denotations to recursively defined programs, Scott proposed working with continuous functions between domains, specifically complete partial orders. As described below, work has continued in investigating appropriate denotational semantics for aspects of programming languages such as sequentiality, concurrency, non-determinism and local state.
Denotational semantics have been developed for modern programming languages that use capabilities like concurrency and exceptions, e.g., Concurrent ML, CSP, and Haskell. The semantics of these languages is compositional in that the denotation of a phrase depends on the denotations of its subphrases. For example, the meaning of the applicative expression f(E1,E2) is defined in terms of semantics of its subphrases f, E1 and E2. In a modern programming language, E1 and E2 can be evaluated concurrently and the execution of one of them might affect the other by interacting through shared objects causing their denotations to be defined in terms of each other. Also, E1 or E2 might throw an exception which could terminate the execution of the other one. The sections below describe special cases of the semantics of these modern programming languages.
Read more about this topic: Denotational Semantics
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or development:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)