Semantical Paradigms: Notes for an Invited Lecture

Abstract

It tooke me quite a few years to understand the point of the continuity in denotational semantics. I'm happy to report below on some recent results which justify my muddle-headedness and help to explain the point too. What follows are some global comments on denotational semantics of teh kinds invited lecturers sometimes indulge themselves in, highlighting "goodness of fit" criteria between semantic domains and symbolic evaluators. For readers impatient with sketchy overviews, two appendices mostly by Cosmadakis provide the key parts of a long proof that Scott domains give a computationally adequate and fully abstract semantics for lambda calculus with simple recursive types.