This book discusses the connection between two areas of semantics, namely the semantics of databases and the semantics of natural language, and links them via a common view of the semantics of time. It is argued that a coherent theory of the semantics of time is an essential ingredient for the success of efforts to incorporate more ???real world??? semantics into database models. This idea is a relatively recent concern of database research but it is receiving growing interest. The book begins with a discussion of database querying which motivates the use of the paradigm of Montague Semantics...

Epistemic logic has grown from its philosophical beginnings to find diverse applications in computer science as a means of reasoning about the knowledge and belief of agents. This book, based on courses taught at universities and summer schools, provides a broad introduction to the subject; many exercises are included together with their solutions. The authors begin by presenting the necessary apparatus from mathematics and logic, including Kripke semantics and the well-known modal logics K, T, S4 and S5. Then they turn to applications in the contexts of distributed systems and artificial...

This book gives applications of the theory of process algebra, or Algebra of Communicating Processes (ACP), that is the study of concurrent or communicating processes studied using an algebraic framework. The approach is axiomatic; the authors consider structures that are some set of mostly equational axioms, which are equipped with several operators. Thus the term ?algebra? is used in the model-theoretic sense. The axiomatic approach enables one to organize the field of process theories. The theory is applied systematically to a number of situations, including systolic algorithms, semantics...

Action Semantics is a novel approach to the formal description of programming languages. Its abstractness is at an intermediate level, between that of denotational and operational semantics. Action Semantics has considerable pragmatic advantages over all previous approaches, in its comprehensibility and accessibility, and especially in the usefulness of its semantic descriptions of realistic programming languages. In this volume, Dr Peter Mosses gives a thorough introduction to action semantics, and provides substantial illustrations of its use. Graduates of computer science or maths who have...

The two notions of proofs and calculations are intimately related. Proofs can involve calculations, and the algorithm underlying a calculation should be proved correct. This volume explores this key relationship and introduces simple type theory. Starting from the familiar propositional calculus, the author develops the central idea of an applied lambda-calculus. This is illustrated by an account of Godel's T, a system that codifies number-theoretic function hierarchies. Each of the book's 52 sections ends with a set of exercises, some 200 in total. An appendix contains complete solutions of...

This introduction to the basic ideas of structural proof theory contains a thorough discussion and comparison of various types of first-order logic formalization. Examples are given of several areas of application, namely: the metamathematics of pure first-order logic, logic programming theory, category theory, modal logic, linear logic, first-order arithmetic and second-order logic. In each case the authors illustrate the methods in relatively simple situations and then apply them elsewhere in much more complex settings. For the new edition, they have rewritten many sections to improve...

This is a systematic and comprehensive introduction both to compositional proof methods for the state-based verification of concurrent programs, such as the assumption-commitment and rely-guarantee paradigms, and to noncompositional methods, whose presentation culminates in an exposition of the communication-closed-layers (CCL) paradigm for verifying network protocols. Compositional concurrency verification methods reduce the verification of a concurrent program to the independent verification of its parts. If those parts are tightly coupled, one additionally needs verification methods based...

The automation of mathematical reasoning has been an important topic of research almost since computers were invented. The new technique of rippling, described here for the first time in book form, is designed to be an approach to mathematical reasoning that takes into account ideas of heuristics and searching. Rippling addresses the problem of combinatorial explosion which has proved a huge obstacle in the past, and the book offers a systematic and comprehensive introduction to this and to the wider subject of automated inductive theorem proving.

In Making a Market, Jean Ensminger analyzes the process by which the market was introduced into the economy of a group of Kenyan pastoralists. Professor Ensminger employs new institutional economic analysis to assess the impact of new market institutions on production and distribution, with particular emphasis on the effect of institutions on decreasing transaction costs over time. This study traces the effects of increasing commercialization on the economic well-being of individual households, rich and poor alike, over considerable time and analyzes the process by which institutions...

This book provides a standard framework for understanding Z specifications.