Abstract

This year, the field of game semantics celebrates the 25th anniversary of one of its cornerstone results: a fully abstract model for the programming language PCF . In this talk, I will give an introduction to game semantics for programming languages, a semantics that interprets types as 2-player games and programs as strategies over these games.

Starting with some reminders from operational and denotational semantics as to the notion of full abstraction, I will then move on presenting a (decidable) game semantics for a small imperative programming language with first order functions, fIA. In the time remaining, I will try to emphasize the expressiveness of game semantics by showing how other programming language features such as recursion or concurrency can be represented in game models.