An Executable Structural Operational Formal Semantics for Python

Abstract: Python is a popular high-level general-purpose programming language also heavily used by the scientific community. It supports a variety of different programming paradigms and is preferred by many for its ease of use. With the vision of harvesting static analysis techniques like abstract interpretation for Python, we develop a formal semantics for Python. A formal semantics is an important cornerstone for any sound static analysis technique. We base our efforts on the general framework of structural operational semantics yielding a small-step semantics in principle allowing for concurrency and interaction with an environment. The main contributions of this thesis are twofold: first, we develop a meta-theoretic framework for the formalization of structural operational semantics in tandem with the necessary tool support for the automated derivation of interpreters from such formal semantics, and, second, we validate the suitability of this approach for the formalization of modern programming languages developing a semantics for Python.