Meaning – The term semantics, refers to the relationships of characters or groups of characters to their meanings, independent of the manner of their interpretation and use.
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 be executed on a certain platform, hence creating a model of computation.
The field of formal semantics encompasses all of the following:
- The definition of semantic models
- The relations between different semantic models
- The relations between different approaches to meaning
- The relation between computation and the underlying mathematical structures from fields such as logic, set theory, model theory, category theory, etc.
Example of usage – “Semantics is a linguistic concept separate from the concept of syntax, which is also often related to attributes of computer programming languages. The idea of semantics is that the linguistic representations or symbols support logical outcomes, as a set of words and phrases signify ideas to both humans and machines.”
