[ Course Documents ] : [ Semantics ]

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Operational Semantics

• Gives a program's meaning in terms of its implementation on a real or virtual machine

• Change in the state of the machine (memory, registers, etc.) defines the meaning of the statement

• To use operational semantics for a high-level language, a virtual machine in needed

• A pure hardware interpreter is too expensive

• A pure software interpreter also has problems:
  • machine-dependent
  • Difficult to understand

• A better alternative: A complete computer simulation