  Python is a popular high-level general-purpose programming language also
heavily used by the scientific community. It supports a variety of different
programming paradigms and is preferred by many for its ease of use. With the
vision of harvesting static analysis techniques like abstract interpretation
for Python, we develop a formal semantics for Python. A formal semantics is an
important cornerstone for any sound static analysis technique. We base our
efforts on the general framework of structural operational semantics yielding a
small-step semantics in principle allowing for concurrency and interaction with
an environment. The main contributions of this thesis are twofold: first, we
develop a meta-theoretic framework for the formalization of structural
operational semantics in tandem with the necessary tool support for the
automated derivation of interpreters from such formal semantics, and, second,
we validate the suitability of this approach for the formalization of modern
programming languages developing a semantics for Python.
