Traditional denotational semantics assigns radically different meanings to one and the same phrase depending on the rest of the programming language. If the language is purely functional, the denotation of a numeral is a function from environments to integers. But, in a functional language with imperative control operators, a numeral denotes a function from environments and continuations to integers. This paper introduces a new format for denotational language specifications, extended direct semantics, that accommodates orthogonal extensions of a language without changing the denotations of existing phrases. An extended direct semantics always maps a numeral to the same denotation: the injection of the corresponding number into the domain of values. In general, the denotation of a phrase in a functional language is always a projection of the denotation of the same phrase in the semantics of an extended language---no matter what the extension is. Based on extended direct semantics, i...

Software contracts help programmers enforce program properties that the language’s type system cannot express. Unlike types, contracts are (usually) enforced at run-time. When a contract fails, the contract system signals an error. Beyond such errors, contracts should have no other observable (functional) effect on the program’s results. In most implementations, however, the language of contracts is the full-fledged programming language, which means that programmers may (intentionally or unintentionally) introduce visible effects into their contracts. Here we present the results of investigating the nature of contracts from a denotational perspective. Specifically, we use SPCF and the category of observably sequential functions to show that contracts are best understood as projections. Thus far, the investigation has produced a significantly faster contract implementation and the insight that our contract language cannot express all projections, which in turn has produced a new contract combinator.

Classical recursion theory asserts that all conventional programming languages are equally expressive because they can define all partial recursive functions over the natural numbers. However, most real programming languages support some form of higher-order data such as potentially infinite streams, lazy trees, and functions. Since these objects do not have finite canonical representations, computations over these objects cannot be accurately modeled as ordinary computations over the natural numbers. In my thesis, I develop a theory of higher order computability based on a new formulation of domain theory. This new formulation interprets elements of any data domain as lazy trees. Like classical domain theory, it provides a universal domain T and a universal language KL. A rich class of domains called observably sequential domains can be specified in T with functions definable in KL. Such an embedding of a data domain enables the operations on the domain to be defined in the universa...