Program Analysis Games Chris Hankin and Pasquale Malacaria Department of Computing, Imperial College, 180 Queen s Gate, London SW7 2BZ, UK Programming Language Semantics has been an active area of research in Computer Science since the 1960s. However, the work has had disappointingly little impact on Computing practice. No commercially successful language has been designed using formal semantics and some even attempt to make a virtue out of the lack of a formal basis. Semantics is seen as something of a black art that is beyond the grasp of the typical programmer. This grim picture has serious long-term implications for the funding of research in this area. One successful application of the work on semantics has been its use in the development of semantics-based program analysis techniques [8]. The work on abstract interpretation, control ow analysis and type (and e ect) systems is based on semantics and has already demonstrated signi cant economic and social bene ts. The techniques have notably been used in verifying mission critical software and in optimising and verifying embedded software. The additional advantage is that these uses of semantics are hidden from the programmer in the inside of, for example, a compiler
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