. We present a method for providing semantic interpretations for languages with a type system featuring inheritance polymorphism. Our approach is illustrated on an extension of the language Fun of Cardelli and Wegner, which we interpret via a translation into an extended polymorphic lambda calculus. Our goal is to interpret inheritances in Fun via coercion functions which are definable in the target of the translation. Existing techniques in the theory of semantic domains can be then used to interpret the extended polymorphic lambda calculus, thus providing many models for the original language. This technique makes it possible to model a rich type discipline which includes parametric polymorphism and recursive types as well as inheritance. A central difficulty in providing interpretations for explicit type disciplines featuring inheritance in the sense discussed in this paper arises from the fact that programs can type-check in more than one way. Since interpretations follow the type...

This is a preprint of a paper that has been submitted to Information and Computation.

Almost all of the categories normally used as a mathematical foundation for denotational semantics satisfy a condition known as consistent completeness. The goal of this paper is to explore the possibility of using a different condition---that of coherence---which has its origins in topology and logic. In particular, we concentrate on those posets whose principal ideals are algebraic lattices and whose topologies are coherent. These form a cartesian closed category which has fixed points for domain equations. It is shown that a "universal domain" exists. Since the construction of this domain seems to be of general significance, a categorical treatment is provided and applied to other classes of domains. Universal domains constructed in this fashion enjoy an additional property: they are saturated. We show that there is exactly one such domain in each of the classes under consideration. 1 Introduction. The first structures used as a mathematical foundation for the denotational semantic...

Recently, a new category of domains used for the mathematical foundations of denotational semantics, that of L-domains, has been under study. In this paper we consider a related category of posets, that of local lattices. First, a completion operator taking posets to local lattices is developed, and then this operator is extended to a functor from posets with embedding-projection pairs to local lattices with embedding-projection pairs. The result of applying this functor to a local lattice yields a local lattice isomorphic to the rst; this functor is a pseudo-retract. Using the functor into local lattices, a continuous pseudo-retraction functor from ω-bifinite posets to ω-bifinite L-domains can be constructed. Such a functor takes a universal domain for the ω-bifinite posets to a universal domain for the ω-bifinite L-domains. Moreover, the existence of such a functor implies that, from the existence of a saturated universal domain for the ω-algebraic bifinites, we can conclude...