From mathematical logic to programming-language semantics: a discussion with Tony Hoare

Abstract

Though logic has permeated through several fields in computing during the past decades, it is not clear exactly how and to what extent it has done so. In an attempt to better understand logic's influence in the history of programming languages (and software engineering in general), I have conducted a discussion with the computing scientist Tony Hoare who, already during the late 1960s, used ideas from mathematical logic to define programming-language semantics. The discussion's transcript, presented in this article, is compared to previously published interviews with Hoare rather technical in that many questions are directly related to mathematical logic and computability theory in particular.