Abstract

We start with several arguments in favor of operational semantics for imperative programming languages. One important purpose of formal semantics is to help a programmer understand a given language (as opposed to particular programs written in that language). We would claim that, when conceiving a program expressed in an imperative language, a journeyman programmer has in mind an ideal machine that executes the language's commands. That is to say, our fundamental understanding of an imperative programming language is behavioral (or operational).

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