POPL submission, pulling together these blog posts on semantics!

Last week I submitted a paper to POPL 2018 about the new kind of denotational semantics that I've been writing about in this blog, which I am now calling declarative semantics. I think this approach to semantics has the potential to replace operational semantics for the purposes of language specification. The declarative semantics has the advantage of being compositional and extensional while, like operational semantics, using only elementary mathematics. Thus, the declarative semantics should be better than operational semantics for reasoning about programs and for reasoning about the language as a whole (i.e. it's meta-theory). The paper pulls together many of the blog posts, updates them, and adds a semantics for mutable references. The paper is available now on arXiv and the Isabelle mechanization is available here. I hope you enjoy it and I welcome your feedback!