Page "Denotational semantics" Paragraph 4

Denotational semantics have been developed for modern programming languages that use capabilities like concurrency and exceptions, e. g., Concurrent ML, CSP, and Haskell.

The semantics of these languages is compositional in that the denotation of a phrase depends on the denotations of its subphrases.

For example, the meaning of the applicative expression f ( E1, E2 ) is defined in terms of semantics of its subphrases f, E1 and E2.

In a modern programming language, E1 and E2 can be evaluated concurrently and the execution of one of them might affect the other by interacting through shared objects causing their denotations to be defined in terms of each other.

Also, E1 or E2 might throw an exception which could terminate the execution of the other one.

The sections below describe special cases of the semantics of these modern programming languages.