On the Separability of Denotational Semantics
Luiz Carlos Castro Guedes
UFF
Edward Hermann Haeusler
PUC-RIO
Many authors say that Mosses observed that denotational semantics
intertwine
model details with the underlying conceptual analysis. However, it is not
written anywhere
what exactly is a model detail or the conceptual analysis.
Mosses proposed
the Action
Semantics approach in order to help hidding the model details under the
concept of facets.
It should be noticed that the separation between actions and facets is not
enough to
characterize language and model concepts respectively.
A rather intuitive
definition for
language inherent concepts, under any framework, is to taking into account
what is
common to every specification of the language.
Anything else should be
considered as
model dependent.
Here, under a Denotational Semantics framework, we
introduce the
concept of Model Algebra as the basis of our separation. From this concept
we define the
corresponding Action Algebra, which will define, together will all other
Action Algebras
for the same language, a category of Action Algebras.
The iterative
pull-back of this
category, named as Language Algebra, formalizes the concept of being
language inherent.
This result is of major relevance to the subject of compiler generation
because it precisely
defines what should be the best description of a programming language.
.