Forms of Semantic Specification

The way to specify a programming language has been a topic of heated debate for some decades and at present there is no consensus on how this is best done. Real languages are almost always specified informally; nevertheless, precision is often enough lacking that more formal approaches could benefit both programmers and language implementors. My purpose is to look at a few of these formal approaches in hope of establishing some distinctions or at least stirring some discussion. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Sciences Technical Report No. MSCIS-91-61. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_reports/337 Forms of Semantic Specification MS-CIS-91-61 Logic & Computation 37