Compiler Construction Chapter 1: Introduction

The following are technical (or at least technically used) terms from chapter 1 that I didn't understand to start with:

• environments p11 : Symbol Tables (Which I have never been properly introduced too either) mapping variable names to information about the variables.
• "side effects" : assignment statements that update variables and data structures. Does that mean that updating a variable is a side effect? I thought assignment statements directly affected change in the variables not that through some unknown or unrelated consequent action a variable happened to be updated by an assignment or update statement. OK so the side effect is associated with a call to a function or maybe an assignment statement that has unexpected results. x = y++; or x=++y;

• DenotationalSematics : [no definition directly given in book]. See below

• AttributeGrammars : this and the previous one "are methods for describing what programming languages do."

Also see Semantics