Semantics will play an important role in the future development of software systems and domain-specific languages. This book provides a needed introductory presentation of the fundamental ideas behind these approaches, stresses their relationship by formulating and proving the relevant theorems, and illustrates the applications of semantics in computer science. Historically important application areas are presented together with some exciting potential applications. The text investigates the relationship between various methods and describes some of the main ideas used, illustrating these by means of interesting applications. The book provides a rigorous introduction to the main approaches to formal semantics of programming languages.

The purpose of this book is to present the fundamental ideas behind operational, denotional and axiomatic semantics; stress their relationship by formulating and proving relevant theorems; and to illustrate the applicability of formal semantics as a tool in computer science. The bulk of the text concentrates on a small core language of while-programs for which the three approaches are developed to roughly the same level of sophistication. To demonstrate the applicability of formal semantics, the authors show how to use semantics for validating prototype implementations of programming languages; how to use semantics for verifying analyses used in more advanced implementations of programming languages; and how to use semantics for verifying useful program properties including information about execution time. The reader should have some experience of functional programming and the BNF-style of specifying the syntax of programming languages.

This textbook is an introduction to the use of formal methods ranging from semantics of key programming constructs to techniques for the analysis and verification of programs. The authors use program graphs as the mechanism for representing the control structure of programs in order to find a balance between generality and conceptual complexity. The early chapters on program graphs and the Guarded Commands language are sufficient introduction for most readers to then enjoy a plug-and-play approach to the remaining chapters. These explain formal methods for analysing the behaviour of programs in various ways ranging from verification, via program analysis and language-based security, to model checking. The remaining chapters present language extensions with procedures and concurrency and cover their semantics. The book is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in software development, and the text is supported throughout with exercises of varying grades of difficulty. The authors have developed an online learning environment that allows students to create examples beyond those covered in the main text, and in the book appendices they present programming projects aimed at implementing central parts of the development using the functional language F#.

Part I of this book is a practical introduction to working with the Isabelle proof assistant. It teaches you how to write functional programs and inductive definitions and how to prove properties about them in Isabelle’s structured proof language. Part II is an introduction to the semantics of imperative languages with an emphasis on applications like compilers and program analysers. The distinguishing feature is that all the mathematics has been formalised in Isabelle and much of it is executable. Part I focusses on the details of proofs in Isabelle; Part II can be read even without familiarity with Isabelle’s proof language, all proofs are described in detail but informally. The book teaches the reader the art of precise logical reasoning and the practical use of a proof assistant as a surgical tool for formal proofs about computer science artefacts. In this sense it represents a formal approach to computer science, not just semantics. The Isabelle formalisation, including the proofs and accompanying slides, are freely available online, and the book is suitable for graduate students, advanced undergraduate students, and researchers in theoretical computer science and logic.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Dependable Software Engineering, SETTA 2021, held in Beijing, China, in November 2021. The 16 full papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions, and are presented with 3 abstracts of keynote speeches. They deal with latest research results and ideas on bridging the gap between formal methods and software engineering.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Rewriting Logic and its Applications, WRLA 2014, held as a satellite event of ETAPS 2014, in Grenoble, France, in March 2014. The 13 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers address a great diversity of topics in the fields of foundations and models of RL; languages based on RL; RL as a logical framework; RL as a semantic framework; use of RL to provide rigorous support for model-based software engineering; formalisms related to RL; verification techniques for RL specifications; comparisons of RL with existing formalisms having analogous aims; application of RL to specification and analysis of distributed systems and physical systems.

This book provides an introduction to the most important basic concepts of computer graphics. It couples the technical background and theory immediately with practical examples and applications. The reader can follow up the theory and then literally see the theory at work in numerous example programs. With only elementary knowledge of the programming language Java, the reader will be able to create his or her own images and animations immediately using Java 2D and Java 3D. A website for this book includes programs with source code, exercises with solutions and slides as teaching material.