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Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Cliff JonesORCiD
The origins of \formal methods" lie partly in language description (although applications of methods like VDM, RAISE or B to areas other than programming languages are probably more widely known). This paper revisits the language description task but uses operational (rather than denotational) semantics to illustrate that the crucial idea is thinking about an abstract model of something that one is trying to understand or design. A \story" is told which links together some of the more important concepts in programming languages and thus illustrates how formal semantics deepens our understanding.
Author(s): Jones CB
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2007
Pages: 66
Print publication date: 01/08/2007
Source Publication Date: August 2007
Report Number: 1046
Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/1046.pdf
