Semantics and Computation

Dear Colleagues,

The discipline of computer science is underwritten by its multifarious languages. Some interface directly with physical machines, while others are designed to be as far removed as possible from such devices. How are these languages defined? In particular, how are they defined semantically? And how do these semantic accounts reflect their computational nature? The objective of this special issue is to address such conceptual questions from the general perspective of the theories of meaning, as may be found in the philosophy of language and in semiotics in general. Bertrand Russell, following John Stuart Mill, argued that linguistic expressions are signs of something other than themselves, and suggested that the meaning of an expression is whatever that expression applies to. In the case of programming languages referential semantics comes in the guise of denotational semantics. However, Programming languages are used for computation and, in order to compute with them, we require rules of computation (operational semantics). These two approaches to semantics are taken to be complementary with soundness and completeness theorems employed to establish their agreement. But they raise a series of philosophical and conceptual questions.

• What kind of denotations are appropriate for programming languages? Are sets, categories and games all equally appropriate? Should decidability concerns enter the picture?
• Does compositional semantics guarantee good language design?
• How are expressions that apparently refer to nothing dealt with? A referential semantics would appear to be committed to the view that expressions such as Father Christmas, and Sherlock Holmes are meaningless. Are programs that do not terminate meaningless?
• Is there a notion of sense as well as reference for programming languages?
• Which is taken to define the language, the referential semantics or the operational one?
• How are semantic accounts related to actual implementations? Can an actual implementation act as a definitional semantics? Or does such an approach succumb to Kripke’s criticism of dispositional semantics?
• What are the philosophical issues that surround the various notions of process and their application to any analyis of non-determinism and parallelism?
• Are there problems of providing semantic accounts for non-standard ways of programming, e.g. machine learning?
• How do semantic theories of programming languages take into account external interactions (e.g. other computing processes or an external environment)?

These questions are not meant to be exhaustive, nor entirely clear, but only to encourage reflection and provide a flavor of the kind of foundational and philosophical concerns that the special issue is aimed at.

Prof. Dr. Raymond Turner
Dr. Henri Stephanou
Guest Editors

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• denotational semantics
• operational semantics
• sense
• reference
• programming languages
• computing process
• compositionality