Visualization Tool for Structural Operational Semantics of Simple Imperative Language

Abstract

We teach the subject of the semantics of programming languages at the graduate level, where we present different approaches to the definition of formal semantics for imperative languages. In this paper, we present a new teaching tool for visualization of semantics computation of a toy imperative language by the small-step semantic method. We have developed a responsive web application that simulates a computation of a program’s semantics as is done by hand on a blackboard.