In praise of algebra
Event details
| Date | 21.06.2011 |
| Hour | 11:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Tony Hoare, Microsoft Research |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
George Boole was a pioneer of the algebraic presentation of logic. I will suggest algebra as a simple way of presenting and reasoning about the semantics of broad families of programming languages. It neatly characterises the similarities and differences between members of the family, and the choices that are made in design of new languages.
Denotational, operational, and deductive semantic presentations can be readily derived from algebraic axioms by algebraic reasoning. When a programming language is extended (for example, by introduction of non-determinism and concurrency), all the earlier and simpler derivations
and theorems remain valid. Prof. Hoare's homepage
Practical information
- General public
- Free