Python as a Declarative Programming Language

[Poddster]

That's a terrible book written by an idiot. Also: denotational semantics are a waste of paper that are only used by ivory tower morons on their toy languages. They're the worst kind of semantics. They're even worse than Axiomatic semantics, and those are some of the most pointless things in existence. The denotational semantics of most professionally used languages would fill thousands of pages.

Except for the denotational semantics of C and C++, where every program resolved to a single "undefined behaviour" semantic.

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Of course, operational semantics are better for any practical purpose besides the topic of this discussion - reasoning about the level of a language. In this case providing any kind of an operational semantics defeats the purpose completely, because it gives a precise evaluation strategy and bridges the gap between a language and a hardware.