The establishment of formal standards for proofs about programs... and the proposal that the semantics of a programming language may be defined independently of all processors for that language, by establishing standards of rigor for proofs about programs in the language, appears to be novel.
"Assigning Meanings to Programs" by Robert W. Floyd, published in "Proceedings of Symposium on Applied Mathematics", Volume 19 (pp. 19-20), 1967.
