ABSTRACT
The Objective of this chapter is to introduce to compiler developers the rudimentary concepts of operational semantics used in specifying the operational behavior of programs and systems, and for reasoning about them. There are already various excellent comprehensive introductions to syntaxdirected approaches to operational semantics, most notably the seminal papers by Plotkin [63] and Kahn [38]. Some of that material has already been incorporated in standard text books on the semantics of programming languages and concurrency, such as those by Winskel [76], Gunter [25], Watt [73] and Hennessy [30]. Yet, though the concepts and techniques employed are mathematically simple and accessible, many compiler developers have not been exposed to them.
