One of the major challenges in denotational semantics is the construction of fully abstract models for sequential programming languages. For the past fteen years, research on this problem has focused on developing models for PCF, an idealized functional programming language based on the typed lambda calculus. Unlike most practical languages, PCF has no facilities for observing and exploiting th...

We describe a denotational, intensional semantics for programs with polymorphic types with bounded quantification, in which phenomena such as inheritance between stateful objects may be represented and studied. Our model is developed from a game semantics for unbounded polymorphism, by establishing dinaturality properties of generic strategies, and using them to give a new construction for inte...

In this paper, we present a general way of giving denotational semantics to a class of languages equipped with an operational semantics that fits the GSOS format of Bloom, Istrail and Meyer. The canonical model used for this purpose will be Abramsky’s domain of synchronization trees, and the denotational semantics automatically generated by our methods will be guaranteed to be fully abstract wi...

Existing logic languages provide some simple "extra-logical" constructs for control manipulation , such as the cut of standard Prolog and the exception handling constructs of other versions of Prolog (e.g. SICStus Prolog). Aspects speciically concerning the ow of control in a language can be quite naturally modelled by means of the Denotational Semantics, and in particular the Denotational Sema...

The vlisp project has produced a rigorously veriied compiler from Scheme to byte codes, and a veriied interpreter for the resulting byte codes. The oocial denotational semantics for Scheme provides the main criterion of correctness. The Wand-Clinger technique was used to prove correctness of the primary compiler step. Then a state machine operational semantics is proved to be faithful to the de...

In this paper we investigate the formal design of concurrent languages based on the concept of continuation. We present a denotational approach of concurrent programs by using continuations for concurrency. We illustrate the approach by designing a continuation semantics for a language with nondeterministic choice, sequential and parallel composition, and a mechanism of communication and synchr...

Many logics for AI applications that are defined by denotational semantics are trivialized in the presence of inconsistency. It is therefore often desirable, and practically useful, to refine such logics in a way that inconsistency does not cause the derivation of any formula, and, at the same time, inferences with respect to consistent premises are not affected. In this paper, we introduce a g...

A fully abstract denotational semantics for the higher-order process language HOPLA is presented. It characterises contextual and logical equivalence, the latter linking up with simulation. The semantics is a clean, domain-theoretic description of processes as downwards-closed sets of computation paths: the operations of HOPLA arise as syntactic encodings of canonical constructions on such sets...