In
programming language theory,
semantics is the field concerned with the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of
programming languages. It does so by evaluating the meaning of
syntactically legal
strings defined by a specific programming language, showing the computation involved. In such a case that the evaluation would be of syntactically illegal strings, the result would be non-computation. Semantics describes the processes a computer follows when executing a program in that specific language. This can be shown by describing the relationship between the input and output of a program, or an explanation of how the program will execute on a certain
platform, hence creating a
model of computation.