Section: Scientific Foundations

Programming language semantics

To bridge the gap between our high-level descriptions of algorithms and conventional programming languages, we investigate the algorithms that are present in programming language implementations, for instance algorithms that are used in a compiler or a static analysis tool. For these algorithms, we generally base our work on the semantic description of a language. The properties that we attempt to prove for an algorithm are, for example, that an optimization respects the meaning of programs or that the programs produced are free of some unwanted behavior. In practice, we rely on this study of programming language semantics to propose extensions to theorem proving tools or to participate in the verification that compilers for conventional programming languages are exempt from bugs.