Preface

This volume collects papers presented at the 30th Annual Conference on Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics (MFPS XXX), held on the campus of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, from Thursday, June 12 through Sunday, June 15, 2014. The MFPS conferences are devoted to those areas of mathematics, logic, and computer science that are related to models of computation in general and to the semantics of programming languages in particular. The series particularly stresses providing a forum where researchers in mathematics and computer science can meet and exchange ideas about problems of common interest. As the series also strives to maintain breadth in its scope, the conference strongly encourages participation by researchers in neighboring areas

Abstract State Machines 1988-1998: Commented ASM Bibliography

An annotated bibliography of papers which deal with or use Abstract State Machines (ASMs), as of January 1998.Comment: Also maintained as a BibTeX file at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm

Several types of types in programming languages

Types are an important part of any modern programming language, but we often forget that the concept of type we understand nowadays is not the same it was perceived in the sixties. Moreover, we conflate the concept of "type" in programming languages with the concept of the same name in mathematical logic, an identification that is only the result of the convergence of two different paths, which started apart with different aims. The paper will present several remarks (some historical, some of more conceptual character) on the subject, as a basis for a further investigation. The thesis we will argue is that there are three different characters at play in programming languages, all of them now called types: the technical concept used in language design to guide implementation; the general abstraction mechanism used as a modelling tool; the classifying tool inherited from mathematical logic. We will suggest three possible dates ad quem for their presence in the programming language literature, suggesting that the emergence of the concept of type in computer science is relatively independent from the logical tradition, until the Curry-Howard isomorphism will make an explicit bridge between them.Comment: History and Philosophy of Computing, HAPOC 2015. To appear in LNC