This textbook is an introduction to denotational semantics and its applications to programming languages. Dr Allison emphasizes a practical approach and the student is encouraged to write and test denotational definitions. The first section is devoted to the mathematical foundations of the subject and sufficient detail is given to illustrate the fundamental problems. The remainder of the book covers the use of denotational semantics to describe sequential programming languages such as Algol, Pascal and C. Throughout, numerous exercises, usually in Pascal, will help the student practise...

Accompanied by a library of software, this book can assist an applications programmer, student or researcher in the fields of data analysis or machine learning to write computer programs based upon this principle. Inference has been around for nearly 50 years and yet only one highly technical book has been written about the subject.