Programsemantik och programanalys

To give a semantics for a programming language means to give a precise definition of the behaviour of programs written in this language. Once the semantics of the language has been described formally, one can go about and prove various language properties like determinism, prove correctness of program implementations based on abstract machines, justify various program analyses used in syntax-oriented editors and program transformations used in optimising compilers, and specify and prove correctness of concrete programs. This provides the formal basis for a variety of software tools for program analysis, optimisation and verification.