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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Relationship between C and C++
Message-ID: <19581@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 29 Mar 90 21:55:30 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 30

In article  <10049@st_nik.UUCP> burr@st_nik.UUCP (For Steve Burr) writes:
>In article <19255@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>, gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>> Sure, but first show me your denotational model of Ada.
>> 
>Certainly, A formal specification of ADA is described using
>the Vienna Development Method in:
>
>"Towards a formal definition of ADA", D.Bjorner et al
>Springer Verlag.

Can't say I've read the article, but given that the title begins with
"Towards...", I'll bet it isn't a complete description of Ada.  If you
want a partial description of C, they are fairly common.

Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a complete denotational
description of _any_ real programming language.  The reason for this
is partly the complexity of denotational descriptions, but a more
compeling reason is that there is so much uninteresting detail in such
a description.  I wrote a denotational description of Icon that solved
all the major problems in the language, but didn't bother writing a
definition for every single operator and built-in function (a task
that would be almost as hard as implementing the language).  I also
didn't write the semantics for some complex but "well understood"
features such as "return"s from a function.  There just isn't much
reason for doing those sorts of things.
-- 
					David Gudeman
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona        gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
Tucson, AZ 85721                 noao!arizona!gudeman