Pierre-Louis Curien - Böcker

This book describes the mathematical aspects of the semantics of programming languages. The main goals are to provide formal tools to assess the meaning of programming constructs in both a language-independent and a machine-independent way, and to prove properties about programs, such as whether they terminate, or whether their result is a solution of the problem they are supposed to solve. In order to achieve this the authors first present, in an elementary and unified way, the theory of certain topological spaces that have proved of use in the modelling of various families of typed lambda calculi considered as core programming languages and as meta-languages for denotational semantics. This theory is known as Domain Theory, and was founded as a subject by Scott and Plotkin. One of the main concerns is to establish links between mathematical structures and more syntactic approaches to semantics, often referred to as operational semantics, which is also described. This dual approach has the double advantage of motivating computer scientists to do some mathematics and of interesting mathematicians in unfamiliar application areas from computer science.

This book describes the mathematical aspects of the semantics of programming languages. The main goals are to provide formal tools to assess the meaning of programming constructs in both a language-independent and a machine-independent way, and to prove properties about programs, such as whether they terminate, or whether their result is a solution of the problem they are supposed to solve. In order to achieve this the authors first present, in an elementary and unified way, the theory of certain topological spaces that have proved of use in the modelling of various families of typed lambda calculi considered as core programming languages and as meta-languages for denotational semantics. This theory is known as Domain Theory, and was founded as a subject by Scott and Plotkin. One of the main concerns is to establish links between mathematical structures and more syntactic approaches to semantics, often referred to as operational semantics, which is also described. This dual approach has the double advantage of motivating computer scientists to do some mathematics and of interesting mathematicians in unfamiliar application areas from computer science.

The papers in this volume were presented at the fourthbiennial Summer Conference on Category Theory and ComputerScience, held in Paris, September3-6, 1991. Category theorycontinues to be an important tool in foundationalstudies incomputer science. It has been widely applied by logicians toget concise interpretations of many logical concepts. Linksbetween logic and computer science have been developed nowfor over twenty years, notably via the Curry-Howardisomorphism which identifies programs with proofs and typeswith propositions. The triangle category theory - logic -programming presents a rich world of interconnections. Topics covered in this volume include the following. Typetheory: stratification of types and propositions can bediscussed in a categorical setting. Domain theory: syntheticdomain theory develops domain theory internally in theconstructive universe of the effective topos. Linear logic:the reconstruction of logic based on propositions asresources leads to alternatives to traditional syntaxes. Theproceedings of the previous three category theoryconferences appear as Lecture Notes in Computer ScienceVolumes 240, 283 and 389.