On 11-01-17 01:55 PM, David Sankel wrote:
I've recently had the opportunity to explain in prose what denotational
semantics are to a person unfamiliar with it. I was trying to get across
the concept of distilling the essence out of some problem domain. I
wasn't able to get the idea across so I'm looking for some simple ways
to explain it.
Does anyone know of a way to explain what's the meaning and objective of
"distilling the essence" without introducing more jargon. One thing that
comes to mind is how Newton's equations for gravity were a distillation
of the essence of the way things fall.
(I'm afraid Newton's equations introduced more jargon too.)
A denotational semantics maps programs to math things. The mapping has
to be by structural recursion over program syntax.
Why math: it's the universal modelling language. Why do we model
programs by a math model: to explain and predict.
Why structural recursion over syntax: to be compositional, the same
reason we stay close to CFGs for syntax: you can build bottom-up and
analyze top-down.
It also happens that the math things are given a partial order to help
answer "what to do with loop constructs and/or cyclic definitions". A
moment of trying to re-invent denotational semantics reveals that this
is the only hard part, and so learning denotational semantics typically
takes 90% of the time on this part.
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