Capturing Pointer Semantics and Scoping Rules

The purpose of this paper is to present a relation-based semantic definition of imperative programming languages, that captures two arcane aspects: pointers and scoping rules. These two aspects are captured with a single mathematical device, which deals with an original definition of the notion of state. Keywords: programming language semantics, denotational semantics, pointers, scoping rules. 1 Background We consider an imperative, block-structured, programming language, such as C, and we are interested in defining its semantics (some aspects thereof). In particular, we are interested in capturing the semantics of pointers and scoping rules. In the context of this paper, we cannot present a general model for our semantic definition; hence we will content ourselves with illustrating our proposal with summary definitions and illustrative examples. We assume the reader familiar with relations; we use the ffi symbol to represent relational product and the b symbol to represent relationa..