A Framework for Programming Denotational Semantics in C++

In this paper, we describe how the denotational semantics of programming languages can be implemented in C++, by exploiting the object-oriented programming paradigm. Such implementations are execution models, extremely useful for the study of programming languages. Although C++ is not a natural choice for this problem domain, compared to functional programming languages such as ML, we suggest a type-safe framework implemented in pure C++, that integrates functional characteristics such as high-order functions and is capable of naturally expressing denotational descriptions. Finally, by comparing our approach to possible implementations using functional languages, we investigate extensions to C++ that would be valuable in this problem domain. 1 Introduction Denotational semantics, or the mathematical approach to programming language semantics, is a formalism that was introduced by D. S. Scott and C. Stratchey in the late '60s. Since then, it has been widely studied by distinguished res..