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Operational Semantics
Operational semantics is a category of formal programming language semantics in which certain desired properties of a program, such as correctness, safety or security, are verified by constructing proofs from logical statements about its execution and procedures, rather than by attaching mathematical meanings to its terms (denotational semantics). Operational semantics are classified in two categories: structural operational semantics (or small-step semantics) formally describe how the ''individual steps'' of a computation take place in a computer-based system; by opposition natural semantics (or big-step semantics) describe how the ''overall results'' of the executions are obtained. Other approaches to providing a formal semantics of programming languages include axiomatic semantics and denotational semantics. The operational semantics for a programming language describes how a valid program is interpreted as sequences of computational steps. These sequences then ''are'' the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Formal Language
In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings whose symbols are taken from a set called "alphabet". The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols that concatenate into strings (also called "words"). Words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called ''well-formed words''. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar such as a regular grammar or context-free grammar. In computer science, formal languages are used, among others, as the basis for defining the grammar of programming languages and formalized versions of subsets of natural languages, in which the words of the language represent concepts that are associated with meanings or semantics. In computational complexity theory, decision problems are typically defined as formal languages, and complexity classes are defined as the sets of the formal languages that can be parsed by machines with limited computational power. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
