Semantics of Program Representation Graphs

Abstract

Program representation graphs are a recently introduced intermediate representation form for programs. In this paper, we develop a mathematical semantics for these graphs by interpreting them as data-flow graphs. We also study the relation between this semantics and the standard operational semantics of programs. We show that the semantics of the program representation graphs is more defined than the program semantics and that for states on which a program terminates normally, the PRG semantics is identical to the program semantics.