this report started working on denotational semantics in collaboration with Christopher Strachey. In order to fix some mathematical precision, he took over some definitions of recursion theorists such as Kleene, Nerode, Davis, and Platek and gave an approach to a simple type theory of higher-type functionals. It was only after giving an abstract characterization of the spaces obtained (through the construction of bases) that he realized that recursive definitions of types could be accommodated as well---and that the recursive definitions could incorporate function spaces as well. Though it was not the original intention to find semantics of the so-called untyped -calculus, such a semantics emerged along with many ways of interpreting a very large variety of languages. A large number of people have made essential contributions to the subsequent developments, and they have shown in particular that domain theory is not one monolithic theory, but that there are several different kinds of constructions giving classes of domains appropriate for different mixtures of constructs. The story is, in fact, far from finished even today. In this report we will only be able to touch on a few of the possibilities, but we give pointers to the literature. Also, we have attempted to explain the foundations in an elementary way---avoiding heavy prerequisites (such as category theory) but still maintaining some level of abstraction---with the hope that such an introduction will aid the reader in going further into the theory. The chapter is divided into seven sections. In the second section we introduce a simple class of ordered structures and discuss the idea of fixed points of continuous functions as meanings for recursive programs. In the third section we discuss computable functions and...

We extend the programming language PCF with a type for (total and partial) real numbers. By a partial real number we mean an element of a cpo of intervals, whose subspace of maximal elements (single-point intervals) is homeomorphic to the Euclidean real line. We show that partial real numbers can be considered as “continuous words”. Concatenation of continuous words corresponds to refinement of partial information. The usual basic operations cons, head and tail used to explicitly or recursively define functions on words generalize to partial real numbers. We use this fact to give an operational semantics to the above referred extension of PCF. We prove that the operational semantics is sound and complete with respect to the denotational semantics. A program of real number type evaluates to a head-normal form iff its value is different from ⊥; if its value is different from ⊥ then it successively evaluates to head-normal forms giving better and better partial results converging to its value.

We present a survey of the recent applications of continuous domains for providing simple computational models for classical spaces in mathematics including the real line, countably based locally compact spaces, complete separable metric spaces, separable Banach spaces and spaces of probability distributions. It is shown how these models have a logical and effective presentation and how they are used to give a computational framework in several areas in mathematics and physics. These include fractal geometry, where new results on existence and uniqueness of attractors and invariant distributions have been obtained, measure and integration theory, where a generalization of the Riemann theory of integration has been developed, and real arithmetic, where a feasible setting for exact computer arithmetic has been formulated. We give a number of algorithms for computation in the theory of iterated function systems with applications in statistical physics and in period doubling route to chao...

Jones and Plotkin give a general construction for forming a probabilistic powerdomain over any directed-complete partial order [Jon90, JP89]. We apply their technique to the failures/divergences semantic model for Communicating Sequential Processes [Hoa85]. The resulting probabilistic model supports a new binary operator, probabilistic choice, and retains all operators of CSP including its two existing forms of choice. An advantage of using the general construction is that it is easy to see which CSP identities remain true in the probabilistic model. A surprising consequence however is that probabilistic choice distributes through all other operators; such algebraic mobility means that the syntactic position of the choice operator gives little information about when the choice actually must occur. That in turn leads to some interesting interaction between probability and nondeterminism. A simple communications protocol is used to illustrate the probabilistic algebra, and several sugg...

The variety of power domain constructions proposed in the literature is put into a general algebraic framework. Power constructions are considered algebras on a higher level: for every ground domain, there is a power domain whose algebraic structure is specified by means of axioms concerning the algebraic properties of the basic operations empty set, union, singleton, and extension of functions. A host of derived operations is introduced and investigated algebraically. Every power construction is shown to be equipped with a characteristic semiring such that the resulting power domains become semiring modules. Power homomorphisms are introduced as a means to relate different power constructions. They also allow to define the notion of initial and final constructions for a fixed characteristic semiring. Such initial and final constructions are shown to exist for every semiring, and their basic properties are derived. Finally, the known power constructions are put into the general framewo...

Lower, upper, sandwich, mixed, and convex power domains are isomorphic to domains of second order predicates mapping predicates on the ground domain to logical values in a semiring. The various power domains differ in the nature of the underlying semiring logic and in logical constraints on the second order predicates.

A number of authors have exported domain-theoretic techniques from denotational semantics to the operational study of contextual equivalence and order. We further develop this, and, moreover, we additionally export topological techniques. In particular, we work with an operational notion of compact set and show that total programs with values on certain types are uniformly continuous on compact sets of total elements. We apply this and other conclusions to prove the correctness of non-trivial programs that manipulate infinite data. What is interesting is that the development applies to sequential programming languages, in addition to languages with parallel features. 1

We introduce observation frames as an extension of ordinary frames. The aim is to give an abstract representation of a mapping from observable predicates to all predicates of a specific system. A full subcategory of the category of observation frames is shown to be dual to the category of T 0 topological spaces. The notions we use generalize those in the adjunction between frames and topological spaces in the sense that we generalize finite meets to infinite ones. We also give a predicate logic of observation frames with both infinite conjunctions and disjunctions, just like there is a geometric logic for (ordinary) frames with infinite disjunctions but only finite conjunctions. This theory is then applied to two situations: firstly to upper power spaces, and secondly we restrict the adjunction between the categories of topological spaces and of observation frames in order to obtain dualities for various subcategories of T 0 spaces. These involve non sober spaces. Contents 1 Introduct...

. Two lower bag domain constructions are introduced: the initial construction which gives free lower monoids, and the final construction which is defined explicitly in terms of second order functions. The latter is analyzed closely. For sober dcpo's, the elements of the final lower bag domains can be described concretely as bags. For continuous domains, initial and final lower bag domains coincide. They are continuous again and can be described via a basis which is constructed from a basis of the argument domain. The lower bag domain construction preserves algebraicity and the properties I and M, but does not preserve bounded completeness, property L, or bifiniteness. 1 Introduction Power domain constructions [13, 15, 16] were introduced to describe the denotational semantics of non-deterministic programming languages. A power domain construction is a domain constructor P , which maps domains to domains, together with some families of continuous operations. If X is the semantic domain ...

Real PCF is an extension of the programming language PCF with a data type for real numbers. Although a Real PCF definable real number cannot be computed in finitely many steps, it is possible to compute an arbitrarily small rational interval containing the real number in a sufficiently large number of steps. Based on a domain-theoretic approach to integration, we show how to define integration in Real PCF. We propose two approaches to integration in Real PCF. One consists in adding integration as primitive. The other consists in adding a primitive for function maximization and then recursively defining integration from maximization. In both cases we have a computational adequacy theorem for the corresponding extension of Real PCF. Moreover, based on previous work on Real PCF definability, we show that Real PCF extended with the maximization operator is universal. 1