Part III gives a progressive series of examples of action semantic descriptions. The programming constructs described all come from ADA. (NO previous familiarity with ADA is required, as the necessary concepts are all explained here.) The examples not only describe a substantial sublanguage of ADA, they also serve as paradigms for description of other programming languages. The description of constructs in the earlier examples remains unchanged in the later examples. This is in marked contrast to denotational semantics, where tedious reformulations of the earlier descriptions would be required when giving the later ones! Appendix A collects the examples together, for convenience of reference—and to show how a medium-scale action semantic description looks in its entirety. It also specifies the detailed specifications of semantic entities that are omitted in Part III.

Navigation

• If this is your first reading, proceed in parallel through Parts II and III: Chapter 4, Chapter 11, Chapter 5, Chapter 12, and so on. This way, you see an illustration of the use of each part of action notation immediately after its introduction.

• If you are already familiar with high-level programming languages, you could alternatively look at each chapter of Part III before the corresponding chapter of Part II. This way, the illustrations in Part III motivate the action notation introduced in Part II.

• If you are revising, and would like an uninterrupted presentation of examples of action semantic descriptions, proceed straight through Part III.