In this paper it is shown how operational semantic methods may be naturally extended to encompass many of the concepts of denotational semantics. This work builds on the standard development of an operational semantics as an interpreter and operational equivalence. The key addition is an operational ordering on sets of terms. From properties of this ordering a closure construction directly yiel...

This thesis develops a semantic model of inheritance and investigates its applications for the analysis and design of programming languages. Inheritance is a mechanism for incremental programming in the presence of self-reference. This interpretation of inheritance is formalized using traditional techniques of fixed-point theory, resulting in a compositional model of inheritance that is directl...

A complete formal semantic description of a practical programming language (such as Java) is likely to be a lengthy document, regardless of which semantic framework is being used. Good modularity of the description is important to the person(s) developing it, to facilitate reuse, change, and extension. Unfortunately, the conventional versions of the major semantic frameworks have rather poor mo...

This paper presents a semantics for a simple language that is a blend of algebraic models and traditional denotational semantics. In this semantics, implementations of user-de ned abstract data types are \compiled" into an algebraic structure, which is used by the denotational part of the semantics whenever an operation of the data type is invoked. To show the utility of such a semantics, an al...

We advance in the study of the semantics of Janus, a C-like reversible programming language. Our study makes utterly explicit some backward and forward evaluation symmetries. We want to deepen mathematical knowledge about the foundations and design principles of reversible computing and programming languages. We formalize a big-step operational semantics and a denotational semantics of Janus. W...