The Fifth International Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics was held on the campus of Tulane University, New Orleans,
Louisiana from March 29 to April 1, 1989. The major goal of this workshop-
conference series is to bring together computer scientists who work in programming
semantics and mathematicians who work in areas which might impact programming
semantics so that they may share ideas and discuss problems of mutual interest.
By letting mathematicians see applications of their work to programming semantics
and by letting computer scientists see their ideas and intuitions expressed in pure
mathematics, the organizers have sought to improve communication among the
researchers in these areas and to establish ties between related areas of research. With
these goals in mind, the invited speakers for the conference were:
Samson Abramsky, Imperial College
Luca Cardelli, DEC Research
Peter Johnstone, University of Cambridge
Robin Milner, University of Edinburgh
Peter Freyd, University of Pennsylvania
John Reynolds, Carnegie-Mellon University
In addition, there were contributed talks by sixteen researchers, as well as a number
of shorter presentations. These last were presented during the Organizers' Sessions,
which were a new and innovative feature of the conference. They were designed to
add flexibility to the program to accommodate interesting new developments which
were not available at the time of the Call for Papers. Two papers from that session,
those by John Gray and by A. J. Power, are included in this volume. In addition,
the paper by C. A. R. Hoare and He Jifeng has evolved from a series of invited
lectures which the authors presented at the Fourth MFPS workshop, which was
held in Boulder, Colorado in 1988.