Where Does Scope Come From? by Michael Robert Bernstein.
From the post:
After several false starts, I finally sat down and watched the first of Frank Pfenning’s 2012 “Proof theory foundations” talks from the University of Oregon Programming Languages Summer School (OPLSS). I am very glad that I did.
Pfenning starts the talk out by pointing out that he will be covering the “philosophy” branch of the “holy trinity” of Philosophy, Computer Science and Mathematics. If you want to “construct a logic,” or understand how various logics work, I can’t recommend this video enough. Pfenning demonstrates the mechanics of many notions that programmers are familiar with, including “connectives” (conjunction, disjunction, negation, etc.) and scope.
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Scope is demonstrated during this process as well. It turns out that in logic, as in programming, the difference between a sensible concept of scope and a tricky one can often mean the difference between a proof that makes no sense, and one that you can rest other proofs on. I am very interested in this kind of fundamental kernel – how the smallest and simplest ideas are absolutely necessary for a sound foundation in any kind of logical system. Scope is one of the first intuitions that new programmers build – can we exploit this fact to make the connections between logic, math, and programming clearer to beginners? (emphasis in the original)
Michael promises more detail on the treatment of scope in future posts.
The lectures run four (4) hours so it is going to take a while to do all of them. My curiosity is whether “scope” in this context refers to variables in programming or does “scope” here extend in some way to scope as used in topic maps?
More to follow.