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Big-step structural operational semantics is also known under the names '''natural semantics''', '''relational semantics''' and '''evaluation semantics'''.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20131019133339/https://fsl.cs.illinois.edu/images/6/63/CS422-Spring-2010-BigStep.pdf University of Illinois CS422]</ref> Big-step operational semantics was introduced under the name ''natural semantics'' by [[Gilles Kahn]] when presenting Mini-ML, a pure dialect of [[ML (programming language)|ML]].
One can view big-step definitions as definitions of functions, or more generally of relations, interpreting each language construct in an appropriate ___domain. Its intuitiveness makes it a popular choice for semantics specification in programming languages, but it has some drawbacks that make it inconvenient or impossible to use in many situations, such as languages with control-intensive features or concurrency{{Citation needed}}.
A big-step semantics describes in a divide-and-conquer manner how final evaluation results of language constructs can be obtained by combining the evaluation results of their syntactic counterparts (subexpressions, substatements, etc.).
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