Customer Reviews

Denotational Semantics: A Methodology for Language Development

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This text along with some very few texts have taught me of how to think analytically and in abstractions, alongside with more in-depth coverage of case analysis, hence the abstractions.

The author, Prof. Schmidt at Kansas Stat University, spent a post-doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, perhaps 1983, while working on writing this text. The text is available free of charge on his web page, but you get what you pay for. No images and no figures appear, some of these, if they do, they appear weirdly.

My first exposition to the text was in 2001, with a paper-photocopy and the online, free electronic copy. But due to its coverage, the way topics were being introduced and covered, I thinks it's a must to have a copy on my shelf, where I purchased the copy later after 7 years.

The incremental approach of introducing topics, along with the lambda calculi, digging in more details ahead, keeps tempting you to like to dive more and more to discover what's inside. One of its cons, some others consider it a drawback, is the abstractions in the program behavior, that are mapped into how to model it as an abstract (lambda calculus) mathematical model. Where also he introduces some other relevancy such as the axiomatic semantics and for sure, through-out all the text, the behavioral semantics of programs modeled mathematically.

I think this approach of the mapping, will help the reader who can seriously follow the topics, to become more acquainted into modeling with abstractions (a.k.a thinking analytically and mathematically), but perhaps other backgrounds are presumed, such as knowledge in various programming language constructs.

For any serious CSers and if you want to learn the lambda calculus, abstractions in program behavior, I recommend that you should read it.

I was wondering, cause after 5 days they send to me a sorry message and my money back because they didn't have the book any more.

What a good deal!