This chapter describes the semantics of Magma (how expressions are evaluated, how identifiers are treated, etc.) in a fairly informal way. Although some technical language is used (particularly in the opening few sections) the chapter should be easy and essential reading for the non-specialist. The chapter is descriptive in nature, describing how Magma works, with little attempt to justify why it works the way it does. As the chapter proceeds, it becomes more and more precise, so while early sections may gloss over or omit things for the sake of simplicity and learnability, full explanations are provided later.
It is assumed that the reader is familiar with basic notions like a function, an operator, an identifier, a type and so on.
And now for some buzzwords: Magma is an imperative, call by value, statically scoped, dynamically typed programming language, with an essentially functional subset. The remainder of the chapter explains what these terms mean, and why a user might want to know about such things.