3 ms·

Out of curiosity, how many languages would meet those criteria? Only one I can think of off the top of my head is CompCert's C dialect. Are there others?

• chrisseaton 5y ago
  It's a spectrum - some languages do it a lot better than others. Not having anything more than a conversational English description of what it does is definitely the lower end of the spectrum. I'm sure very few are doing it perfectly, but for example Java has a formal semantics.
  • fcurts 5y ago
    > but for example Java has a formal semantics. I don't think that's really true. The Java language specification is entirely prose. The book you linked to was written by "outsider" authors and published in 1999 (!).
    • chrisseaton 5y ago
      That was just one example of many - there's a whole cottage industry of writing formal semantics for Java. https://fsl.cs.illinois.edu/publications/bogdanas-rosu-2015-popl.pdf https://fsl.cs.illinois.edu/publications/bogdanas-rosu-2015-...
      • fcurts 5y ago
        None of them are official, and I bet they make major simplifications (the one you just linked to is for Java 1.4). I doubt actual language/tooling implementors benefit much from them.
• c-cube 5y ago
  Standard ML certainly has clear specifications and proofs of soundness of the type system.