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semantics book by Tennent



Date: Wed, 31 Jul 91 11:57:08 EDT

"Semantics of Programming Languages" by R.D. Tennent, Queen's University,
Kingston, Canada, with a foreword by John C. Reynolds, Carnegie-Mellon
University.

Prentice-Hall International ISBN 0-13-805607-2

This is a rigorous exposition of the most important and fundamental
work on semantics of programming languages, together with necessary
background material from logic, type theory, domain theory, and
category theory.

The presentation is organized around three example programming
languages:  the simple imperative language of WHILE programs, a
purely functional language based on the simply-typed lambda calculus,
and an Algol 60-like procedural language which is an extension of
both of the simple languages.

All of the major approaches to semantics -- denotational, operational,
and axiomatic -- and the relations between them are discussed in detail.
The syntactic and semantic methods presented are particularly 
appropriate to modern typed programming languages.