Introduction to the constructive point of view in the foundations of mathematics, in particular intuitionism due to L.E.J. Brouwer, constructive recursive mathematics due to A.A. Markov, and Bishop’s constructive mathematics. The constructive interpretation and formalization of logic is described. For constructive (intuitionistic) arithmetic, Kleene’s realizability interpretation is given; this provides an example of the possibility of a constructive mathematical practice which diverges from classical mathematics. The crucial notion in intuitionistic analysis, choice sequence, is briefly described and some principles which are valid for choice sequences are discussed. The second half of the article deals with some aspects of proof theory, i.e., the study of formal proofs as combinatorial objects. Gentzen’s fundamental contributions are outlined: his introduction of the so-called Gentzen systems which use sequents instead of formulas and his result on first-order arithmetic showing that (suitably formalized) transfinite induction up to the ordinal "0 cannot be proved in first-order arithmetic.

This paper introduces the theory of a particular kind of computation domains called concrete domains. The purpose of this theory is to find a satisfactory framework for the notions of coroutine computation and sequentiality of evaluation. Diagrams are emphasized because I believe that an important part of learning lattice theory is the acquisition of skill in drawing diagrams. George Gratzer 1 Domains of computation In general, we follow Scott's approach [Sco70]. To every syntactic object one associates a semantic object which is found in an appropriate semantic domain. For technical details, we follow [Mil73] and [Plo78] rather than Scott. Definition 1.1 A partial order is a pair ! D; ? where D is a non-empty set and is a binary relation satisfying: i) 8x 2 D x x (reflexivity) ii) 8x; y 2 D x y; y x ) x = y (antisymmetry) iii) 8x; y; z 2 D x y; y z ) x z (transitivity) One writes x ! y when x y and x 6= y. Two elements x and y are comparable when either x y or y x. W...

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...

ion and PCF John Longley Gordon Plotkin March 15, 1996 Abstract We introduce the concept of logical full abstraction, generalising the usual equational notion. We consider the language PCF and two extensions with "parallel" operations. The main result is that, for standard interpretations, logical full abstraction is equivalent to equational full abstraction together with universality; the proof involves constructing enumeration operators. We also consider restrictions on logical complexity and on the level of types. 1 Introduction The study of denotational semantics seeks to provide mathematical descriptions of programming languages by giving denotations of programs in terms of previously understood mathematical structures. For example, if P is a program that takes an input and produces an output, we might take its denotation to be a function from a set of input-values to a set of output-values. The most widely-known approach to denotational semantics is that of traditiona...

. We introduce a bicartesian closed category of what we call profinite domains. Study of these domains is carried out through the use of an equivalent category of pre-orders in a manner similar to the information systems approach advocated by Dana Scott and others. A class of universal profinite domains is defined and used to derive sufficient conditions for the profinite solution of domain equations involving continuous operators. As a special instance of this construction, a universal domain for the category SFP is demonstrated. Necessary conditions for the existence of solutions for domain equations over the profinites are also given and used to derive results about solutions of some equations. A new universal bounded complete domain is also demonstrated using an operator which has bounded complete domains as its fixed points. 1 Introduction. For our purposes a domain equation has the form X ¸ = F (X) where F is an operator on a class of semantic domains (typically, F is an endof...

Abstract. Perhaps surprisingly, there are infinite sets that admit mechanical exhaustive search in finite time. We investigate three related questions: What kinds of infinite sets admit mechanical exhaustive search in finite time? How do we systematically build such sets? How fast can exhaustive search over infinite sets be performed? Keywords. Higher-type computability and complexity, Kleene–Kreisel functionals, PCF, Haskell, topology. 1.

Models of the untyped λ-calculus may be defined either as applicative structures satisfying a bunch of first order axioms, known as “λ-models”, or as (structures arising from) any reflexive object in a cartesian closed category (ccc, for brevity). These notions are tightly linked in the sense that: given a λ-model A, one may define a ccc in which A (the carrier set) is a reflexive object; conversely, if U is a reflexive object in a ccc C, having enough points, then C ( , U) may be turned into a λ-model. It is well known that, if C does not have enough points, then the applicative structure C ( , U) is not a λ-model in general. This paper: (i) shows that this mismatch can be avoided by choosing appropriately the carrier set of the λ-model associated with U; (ii) provides an example of an extensional reflexive object D in a ccc without enough points: the Kleisli-category of the comonad “finite multisets ” on Rel; (iii) presents some algebraic properties of the λ-model associated with D by (i) which make it suitable for dealing with non-deterministic extensions of the untyped λ-calculus.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate a type system for databases and object-oriented programming and to design a statically typed programming language for these applications. Such a language should ideally have a static type system that supports: • polymorphism and static type inference, • rich data structures and operations to represent various data models for databases including the relational model and more recent complex object models, • central features of object-oriented programming including user definable class hierarchies, multiple inheritance, and data abstraction, • the notion of extents and object-identities for object-oriented databases. Without a proper formalism, it is not obvious that the construction of such a type system is possible. This thesis attempts to construct one such formalism and proposes a programming language that uniformly integrate all of the above features. The specific contributions of this thesis include: • A simple semantics for ML polymorphism and axiomatization of the equational theory of ML. • A uniform generalization of the relational model to arbitrary complex database objects that

this paper is to give complete proofs of the density theorem and the choice principle for total continuous functionals in the natural and concrete context of the partial continuous functionals [Ers77], essentially by specializing more general treatments in the literature. The proofs obtained are relatively short and hopefully perspicious, and may contribute to redirect attention to the fundamental questions Kreisel originally was interested in. Obviously this work owes much to other sources. In particular I have made use of work by Scott [Sco82] (whose notion of an information system is taken as a basis to introduce domains), Roscoe [Ros87], Larsen and Winskel [LW84] and Berger [Ber93]. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 treats information systems, and in section 2 it is shown that the partial orders defined by them are exactly the (Scott) domains with countable basis. Section 3 gives a characterization of the continuous functions between domains, in terms of approximable mappings. In section 4 cartesian products and function spaces of domains and information systems are introduced. In section 5 the partial and total continuous functionals are defined. Section 6 finally contains the proofs of the two theorems above; it will be clear that the same proofs also yield effective versions of these theorems.

W.C. Rounds and G.-Q. Zhang have proposed to study a form of disjunctive logic programming generalized to algebraic domains [1]. This system allows reasoning with information which is hierarchically structured and forms a (suitable) domain. We extend this framework to include reasoning with default negation, giving rise to a new nonmonotonic reasoning framework on hierarchical knowledge which encompasses answer set programming with extended disjunctive logic programs. We also show that the hierarchically structured knowledge on which programming in this paradigm can be done, arises very naturally from formal concept analysis. Together, we obtain a default reasoning paradigm for conceptual knowledge which is in accordance with mainstream developments in nonmonotonic reasoning.