Semantics for programming languages with Coq encodings: First part: natural semantics

MasterThis course is devised as an introduction to different techniques used in studying programming language semantics. It is inspired from the first chapters of a book written in 1993 by Glynn Winskel, The formal semantics of programming languages, an introduction and published by MIT Press in the series Foundations of Computing. We will present the following aspects: 1. Natural semantics: presenting program execution as a logical system, 2. Proofs by induction: applications to programming languages, 3. Executing semantic specifications, 4. Proofs in semantics. All our work will be illustrated on the study of a very small language, which represents a fragment present in C, Java or C++: the language of assignments and while-loops. The various semantic concept will then be illustrated and implemented in the Coq system