Revisiting memory assignment semantics in imperative programming languages

This thesis studies the semantics of imperative programming languages. In particular, it explores the relationship between the syntax and semantics of memory assignment. The contributions are threefold. First, I developed a theoretical programming language, called the assignment calculus, to uniformly express the assignment semantics of imperative programming languages. Second, I formalized common memory errors (e.g. access to uninitialized memory and memory leaks) in the context of this language, and provided dynamic and static approaches to prevent them. Third, I developed a general purpose programming language called Anzen, based on the theoretical foundation of the assignment calculus.