to present the major ideas from the area of formal semantics of programming languages; to demonstrate their importance to language design and implementation, and to program verification, specification and refinement; to develop simple mathematical techniques for describing the semantics of programs and reasoning about their denotations; to give an overview of the relationships between program semantics and logics of computation.

(LO1) By the end of the module, students will: understand the concept of formal semantics of programs and the mathematical techniques used to describe the semantics of programming languages; be able to use these in reasoning about programs and computations; have a deeper understanding of the notions o computation and data structure; have a deeper understanding of program specification,verification and refinement, as well as the issues involved in integrating software components written in different languages.

1 Introduction and Overview (3 lectures)     syntax and semantics; informal semantics;     programming languages and compositional semantics;     logic and computation   Denotational Semantics (6 lectures)     programs as functions; loops and recursion; fixed points   Semantics of Data Structures (9 lectures)     algebraic specifications; models;     equational deduction and computation as proof   Axiomatic Semantics (12 lectures)     specification of programs and languages; correctness proofs;     objects, data structures and local states

Teaching Method 1 - Lecture
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