This book describes the mathematical aspects of the semantics of programming languages. The main goals are to provide formal tools to assess the meaning of programming constructs in both a language-independent and a machine-independent way and to prove properties about programs, such as whether they terminate, or whether their result is a solution of the problem they are supposed to solve. In order to achieve this the authors first present, in an elementary and unified way, the theory of certain topological spaces that have proved of use in the modeling of various families of typed lambda calculi considered as core programming languages and as meta-languages for denotational semantics. This theory is now known as Domain Theory, and was founded as a subject by Scott and Plotkin. One of the main concerns is to establish links between mathematical structures and more syntactic approaches to semantics, often referred to as operational semantics, which is also described. This dual approach has the double advantage of motivating computer scientists to do some mathematics and of interesting mathematicians in unfamiliar application areas from computer science.

This book describes the mathematical aspects of the semantics of programming languages. The main goals are to provide formal tools to assess the meaning of programming constructs in both a language-independent and a machine-independent way and to prove properties about programs, such as whether they terminate, or whether their result is a solution of the problem they are supposed to solve. In order to achieve this the authors first present, in an elementary and unified way, the theory of certain topological spaces that have proved of use in the modeling of various families of typed lambda calculi considered as core programming languages and as meta-languages for denotational semantics. This theory is now known as Domain Theory, and was founded as a subject by Scott and Plotkin. One of the main concerns is to establish links between mathematical structures and more syntactic approaches to semantics, often referred to as operational semantics, which is also described. This dual approach has the double advantage of motivating computer scientists to do some mathematics and of interesting mathematicians in unfamiliar application areas from computer science.

The papers in this volume were presented at the fourth biennial Summer Conference on Category Theory and Computer Science, held in Paris, September3-6, 1991. Category theory continues to be an important tool in foundationalstudies in computer science. It has been widely applied by logicians to get concise interpretations of many logical concepts. Links between logic and computer science have been developed now for over twenty years, notably via the Curry-Howard isomorphism which identifies programs with proofs and types with propositions. The triangle category theory - logic - programming presents a rich world of interconnections. Topics covered in this volume include the following. Type theory: stratification of types and propositions can be discussed in a categorical setting. Domain theory: synthetic domain theory develops domain theory internally in the constructive universe of the effective topos. Linear logic: the reconstruction of logic based on propositions as resources leads to alternatives to traditional syntaxes. The proceedings of the previous three category theory conferences appear as Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volumes 240, 283 and 389.