Semantics Versus Implementation
According to Dana Scott :
- It is not necessary for the semantics to determine an implementation, but it should provide criteria for showing that an implementation is correct.
According to Clinger (1981):
- Usually, however, the formal semantics of a conventional sequential programming language may itself be interpreted to provide an (inefficient) implementation of the language. A formal semantics need not always provide such an implementation, though, and to believe that semantics must provide an implementation leads to confusion about the formal semantics of concurrent languages. Such confusion is painfully evident when the presence of unbounded nondeterminism in a programming language's semantics is said to imply that the programming language cannot be implemented.
Read more about this topic: Denotational Semantics