Abstract

There have been many suggestions for what should be a computable real number or function. Some of them exhibited pathological properties. At present, research concentrates either on an application of Weihrauch's Type Two Theory of Effectivity or on domain-theoretic approaches, in which case the partial objects appearing during computations are made explicit. A further, more analysis-oriented line of research is based on Grzegorczyk's work. All these approaches are claimed to be equivalent, but not in all cases proofs have been given. In this paper it is shown that a real number as well as a real-valued function are computable in Weihrauch's sense if and only if they are definable in Escardo's functional language Real PCF, an extension of the language PCF by a new ground type for (total and partial) real numbers. This is exactly the case if the number is a computable element in the continuous domain of all compact real intervals and/or the function has a computable extension to this doma...

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