The denotational semantics of an object oriented programming language

Abstract

Recently, several descriptions of object oriented programming languages with denotational semantics have been given. Cook presented a denotational semantics of class inheritance. This semantics abstracts from the internal state of objects, which is one of their salient characteristics. In this paper we show that Cooks denotational semantics of class inheritance is applicable to object oriented programming languages, where objects have a state. For this purpose we define a direct denotational semantics of a small object oriented programming language. We claim that the resulting denotational semantics is clear and can serve the derivation of efficient implementations of object oriented programming languages.