Course: Semantics of Programming Languages WS 2006/07

This course can be used for MSc-modules III.1.3 und III.1.4 (SWTuIS).

Lectures

Monday 16-18, E2.310, Start: October 23, 2006

Tutorials

Monday 14-16, E2.310 (bi-weekly), Start: October 30, 2006

Oral exams

The oral exams for this course will be held on Feb. 21, 2007 and on March, 21, 2007. Please contact Ekkart Kindler for reserving a time slot for your exam. The first reservations can be made during the tutorial and lecture on Jan., 29.

Please note that, according to the new procedures, all students are required to offcially register for the oral exams at the Prüfungssekretariat after reserving a time slot for the exam. This official registration must be made not later than two weeks before the exam.

Lecturer

Ekkart Kindler (mailto:kindler@uni-paderborn.de), Room E3.167

Material

All assignments and selected solutions will be available at http://www.uni-paderborn.de/cs/kindler/Lehre/WS06/SvP/material.html.

Prerequisites

This course requires basic knowledge in logics and in concepts of programming languages.

Contents

The semantics of a programming language assigns a meaning to each syntactically correct program of this language; this could, for example, be the mathematical function that is calculated by the program. This course introduces different techniques and methods for defining and analysing the semantics of programming languages. These techniques include inductive definitions and inductive proofs as well as fixed-point theory. Based on these techniques the course presents operational, denotational and axiomatic semantics for programming languages and the relation between them.

Literature

The course is based on the follwing books and the (German) lecture notes:

G. Winskel: The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages: An Introduction
MIT Press 1993.

E. Kindler: Semantik (German lecture notes), WS 2004/05.

E. Best: Semantik: Theorie sequentieller und paralleler Programmierung.
Vieweg, Lehrbuch Informatik 1995.