Natural Semantics for Imperative and Object-Oriented Programming Languages

. We present a declarative specification method based on natural semantics which is suitable for the definition of the static and dynamic semantics of imperative and object-oriented programming languages. We show how the semantic analysis can be generated automatically by creating, for each program under consideration, a constraint problem whose solution is also a valid attribution. In contrast to previous implementations of natural semantics, our generation algorithm for the semantic analysis is more flexible because it allows us to compute a program's attributes independently from its syntax tree. For special cases, we have defined efficient solution strategies. We also describe our prototype implementation using the concurrent constraint programming language Oz. 1 Introduction In principle, specifications of the semantics of programming languages serve two different purposes. Either they are the formal basis to verify language or program properties, or they are used to g..