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In programming language theory, semantics is the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. [1] Semantics assigns computational meaning to valid strings in a programming language syntax. It is closely related to, and often crosses over with, the semantics of mathematical proofs.
In computer programming, a reference is a value that enables a program to indirectly access a particular datum, such as a variable's value or a record, in the computer's memory or in some other storage device. The reference is said to refer to the datum, and accessing the datum is called dereferencing the reference. A reference is distinct from ...
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
The decorator pattern is a design pattern used in statically-typed object-oriented programming languages to allow functionality to be added to objects at run time; Python decorators add functionality to functions and methods at definition time, and thus are a higher-level construct than decorator-pattern classes.
A programming language specification can take several forms, including the following: An explicit definition of the syntax and semantics of the language. While syntax is commonly specified using a formal grammar, semantic definitions may be written in natural language (e.g., the approach taken for the C language), or a formal semantics (e.g., the Standard ML [3] and Scheme [4] specifications).
Generally, a reference is a value that enables a program to directly access the particular data item. Most programming languages support some form of reference. For the specific type of reference used in the C++ language, see reference (C++). The notion of reference is also important in relational database theory; see referential integrity.
Syntax therefore refers to the form of the code, and is contrasted with semantics – the meaning. In processing computer languages, semantic processing generally comes after syntactic processing; however, in some cases, semantic processing is necessary for complete syntactic analysis, and these are done together or concurrently.
In computer science, denotational semantics (initially known as mathematical semantics or Scott–Strachey semantics) is an approach of formalizing the meanings of programming languages by constructing mathematical objects (called denotations) that describe the meanings of expressions from the languages.