deBdeV96 : Abstract
The authors' monograph "Control Flow Semantics" (MIT Press)
gives an extensive exposition of comparative programming language semantics
using techniques from metric topology.
In the book Banach's fixed-point theorem for complete metric spaces plays
a prominent role in the construction and comparison of semantcal models.
Here we present the basic idea of exploiting Banach's theorem.
The approach is illustrated with the definition of an operational
and a denotational model for an abstrat proramming language with
parallelism.
Note: The work reported here is not novel, but intended to provide an
introduction of the metric approach to programming language semantics for
a nonspecialist audience.