DENOTATIONAL SEMANTICS IN THE CPO AND METRIC APPROACH

We investigate the implications of choosing a cpo-framework resp. a complete metric space framework for defining denotational semantics of languages that allow for recursion/iteration, communication and concurrency. We first establish a general framework for the cpo and the metric approach. The existence and uniqueness of meaning functions is studied. In the metric case the existence and uniqueness of a meaning function can be established under some reasonable assumptions. In the cpo-case we obtain the existence of a least meaning function. From these theroems consistency results can be concluded. In the second part we study the impact of the choice between cpo and metric for semantics based on event-structures and for semantics based on pomset classes.