Game semantics has been used to interpret both proofs and functional programs: an important further development on the programming side has been to model higher-order programs with state by allowing strategies with “history-sensitive” behaviour. In this paper, we develop a detailed analysis of the structure of these strategies from a logical perspective by showing that they correspond to proofs...

Starting from the observation that rational closure has the undesirable property of being an “all or nothing” mechanism, we here propose a multipreferential semantics, which enriches the preferential semantics underlying rational closure in order to separately deal with the inheritance of different properties in an ontology with exceptions. We provide a multipreference closure mechanism which i...

In [11] we presented a compositional interpreter for a CSP-like language and we showed that, by using the ”continuation semantics for concurrency” (CSC) technique (recently introduced by us), denotational semantics can be used as a prototyping method for concurrent programming languages. In this paper we employ domains (which are complete partial orders) and continuous functions in developing a...

This paper presents the derivation of a denotational semantics from an operational semantics for a subset of the widely used hardware description language Verilog. Our aim is to build an equivalence between the operational and denotational semantics. We propose a discrete time semantic model for Verilog. Algebraic laws are also investigated in this paper, with the ultimate aim of providing a un...

We transform probabilistic programs to run more efficiently and read more easily, by composing three semantics-preserving transformations: (1) apply the denotational semantics; (2) improve the resulting integral; then (3) invert the denotational semantics. Whereas step 1 is a straightforward transformation from monadic to continuation-passing style, the rest builds on computer algebra: step 2 r...

In this paper we study the Calculus of Higher Order Communicating Systems (CHOCS) (Thomsen, Proc. of POPL’89, ACM, 1989, pp. 143–154; Inform. Comput. 116(1) (1995) 38–57) in a denotational setting. We present a construction of a denotational semantics for CHOCS which resides in a domain constructed using the standard constructions of separated sum, Cartesian product, the Plotkin power domain co...