We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
About this book
This is a book about structural operational semantics; more precisely it is a book that describes how this approach to semantics can be used to describe common programming language constructs and to reason about the behaviour of programs.
The text grew out of the lecture notes that I have used over a period of more than 10 years in the course Syntax and semantics which is taught to all students following the various degree programmes in computer science at Aalborg University. What began as a 10-page set of notes in Danish is now a textbook in English.
The book also includes chapters on related material, namely short introductions to type systems, denotational semantics and the mathematics necessary to understand recursive definitions.
Related work
This work was inspired by lecture notes by Plotkin (1981) (also written in Denmark), where this approach to programming language semantics was first presented.
The topic of structural operational semantics also appears in later books, three of which I will mention here.
Reynolds' book (Reynolds, 1999) is an excellent text that covers some of the same topics as this book but uses denotational and axiomatic semantics as well as structural operational semantics.
The book by Winskel (1993) is another very good textbook that covers many of the same topics as Reynolds' book.
Finally, I should mention Nielson and Nielson (2007), which introduces and relates denotational, axiomatic and structural operational semantics and then gives an introduction to how these can be used in connection with static program analysis.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
