Abstract

Abstract. This chapter presents a dynamic denotational semantics of the Java programming language. This semantics covers almost the full range of the base language, excluding only concurrency and the API's. A discussion of these limitations is provided in the nal section of the chapter. The abstract syntax described in Chapter 1 tells us how to construct a grammatically correct program. Every syntactically correct program describes an environment that provides all the information about what to do during program execution. The semantics presented in this chapter, formalizes the de nition of Java program beahior as de ned in the Java Language Speci cation (JLS) [1]. We describe the Java environment in Section 1. Each executing program is associated with a store that is a repository for all instance values during program execution. The Java store is described in Section 2. Executing a Java program begins with executing the command in the static method \main " in the given class de nition. Therefore, the result of a program depends on the semantics of commands and the expressions in the commands. We shall introduce a denotational semantics of these commands and expressions in Sections 3 and 4. Throughout these semantics, we concurrently de ne two sets of semantics, a dynamic and a static semantics, to respectively represent the execution and definitional denotations of the programs. 1

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