Title: A journey into the semantics of programming languages

Speaker: Prof. Pierre-Louis Curien  (Principal Investigator, R2 team, PPS laboratory, CNRS, Paris 7, and INRIA)

Time: 3:00pm, May 24th (Tuesday), 2011.

Place: Lecture Room, Level 3, Building No. 5, State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

In this talk, we try to trace back to the origins of the denotational and operational semantics of programming languages, paying tribute to pioneers like John McCarthy, Christopher Strachey, Peter Landin, Dana Scott, Gordon Plotkin and many other figures of this field.

Bibliography:

Pierre-Louis Curien is a specialist of the semantics of programming languages (both denotational and operational). After graduating from the 　Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris, he worked with Gérard Berry on a mathematical account of the notion of sequential program, where programs as functions and programs as algorithms get closer. His most widely-known contributions are outcomes of this early work. They include the Categorical Abstract Machine (for functional programming languages), the theory of Explicit Substitutions, and a core calculus for the Duality of Computation (where the dualities are input versus output, lazy versus eager). During the last decade, he has set up and been the director of the laboratory PPS (Proofs, Programs and Systems, Paris Diderot University and CNRS), which has become a major center worldwide around programming languages and proof theory.