We prove the correctness of incremental lambda-lifting, an optimization that attempts to reduce the closure allocation overhead of higher-order programs by changing the scope of nested procedures. This optimization is invalid in the standard denotational semantics of Scheme, because it changes the storage behavior of the program. Our method consists of giving Scheme a denotational semantics in ...

Distance semantics is a robust way of handling dynamically evolving and possibly contradictory information. In this paper we show that in many cases distance-based entailments can be computerized in a general and modular way. We consider two different approaches for reasoning with distance semantics, apply them on some common cases, and show their relation to other known problems.

interpretation from a denotational-semantics perspective

LDL is a system supporting the design of procedural programming languages and generating prototype interpreters directly from the language definition. A language definition is based on GSFs a kind of attribute grammars and the denotational semantics approach. It is shown how denotational semantics can be transformed into Prolog. It is also shown how the correctness of the prototype interpreters...

In this paper, we present a general way of giving denotational semantics to a class of languages equipped with an operational semantics that ts the GSOS format of Bloom, Istrail and Meyer. The canonical model used for this purpose will be Abramsky's domain of synchronization trees, and the denotational semantics automatically generated by our methods will be guaranteed to be fully abstract with...

In the trust-structure model of trust management, principals specify their trusting relationships with other principals in terms of trust policies. In their paper on trust structures, Carbone et al. present a language for such policies, and provide a suitable denotational semantics. The semantics ensures that for any collection of trust policies, there is always a unique global trust-state, com...

With the aim of putting type-based reasoning for functional logic languages, as recently explored by Christiansen et al. (2010), on a formal basis, we develop a denotational semantics for a typed core language of Curry. Dealing with the core language FlatCurry rather than with full Curry suffices, since there exists a type-preserving translation from the latter into the former. In contrast to e...

Stochastic process algebras, which combine the features of a process calculus with stochastic analysis, were introduced to enable compositional performance analysis of systems. At the level of syntax, compositionality presents itself in terms of operators, which can be used to build more complex systems from simple components. Denotational semantics is a method for assigning to syntactic object...

The semantics of C is described in the ANSIrISO standard using natural language. This paper contains a brief summary, more descriptive than technical, of our research in specifying a complete and accurate formal semantics for ANSI C. We follow the denotational approach and divide the specification in three distinct phases: static, typing and dynamic semantics. Moreover, we have developed a dire...