Can all languages have semantic and logical errors?

I have been reading about PHP and many authors mention semantic and logical errors separately. As an example of a semantic error, they give a function called with incorrect number of parameters: this will not be caught by the parser, but will throw an error when run.

Yet in languages such as C++, this will be caught by the compiler. I would say that it's a syntax error then. What is the difference then between a semantic and a logical error?

For example, in How to think like a computer scientist, the author uses "logic error" and "semantic error" interchangeably. On the other hand, in the Visual Basic .NET. Primer Plus, "logic error" is separated from "semantic error".

I think most likely the explanation for some authors using "logic error" and "semantic error" interchangeably and some authors drawing a distinction is simply that they don't have a precise universally accepted definition, and so people are using the terminology slightly differently. I wouldn't get hung up on it.

Both "logic" and "semantic" imply something to do with the meaning of the programming, so it would be easy to regard them as the same.

If I were to draw a distinction, a useful one I can see is that a logic error is when the program ends up meaning something other than what the programmer intended, and a semantic error is when the program ends up not meaning anything (consistent) at all. With those definitions, you could either regard logic errors as a superset of semantic errors, or that logic errors exclude errors that result in the program being inconsistent.

For example, the following pseudo code contains only a logic error:

x = read_number_from_user("x: ")
y = read_number_from_user("x: ")
print("The product of x and y is: ")
print(stringify(x + y))

The meaning of this program (taken solely as-is and without considering the programmer's intent) is perfectly straightforward and consistent. But it doesn't mean what the programmer intended it to mean.

OTOH, the following pseudo code contains a semantic error:

name = read_string_from_user("What is your name?")
print(name + 1)

At least, it does if we assume that adding a string and a number doesn't mean anything. In languages like PHP it does mean something, and this wouldn't be a semantic error.

Your example of a semantic error in PHP as calling a function with an incorrect number of parameters is actually interesting, because it's debatable whether you should call that a semantic error (with the definition I'm using).

Functions are defined dynamically at runtime in PHP. So calling a function with an incorrect number of parameters could be regarded as a logic error; perhaps the wrong include statement was executed, causing a different function with the same name to be included than the one the call was supposed to go to. Even if not, calling a function with the wrong number of arguments does mean something; it means lookup the function with this name and pass it these arguments. It's only operationally at runtime that it turns out the interpreter is unable to carry out those requests; just as x / y means something, but may be impossible to carry out if y happens to be 0 at runtime.

Ultimately, how you classify errors using a distinction like the one I'm making here between logic and semantic errors (even if it's not exactly the one I'm making) depends very much on the particular language you're talking about and how you assign meaning to programs in the language. Most commonly used languages do not have a standard way of assigning meaning to their programs, which means that everyone uses a slightly different way of doing so (though everyone's interpretation would agree very closely on almost all operational effects), and would analyse the "logical" vs "semantic" distinction differently.

Another similar way of looking at it would be to say that semantic errors are whatever causes the programming language to reject the program as invalid (apart from syntactic errors, though again you could call those a subset of semantic errors if you want). If the programming language accepts the program then it means something, and if it fails at runtime then that is the result of a logic error. This is pretty much assigning the programming language implementation (interpreter, compiler + runtime system, whatever) as the definition of what programs mean.

StackExchange Computer Science Q#3519, answer score: 8