A Functional Approach to Computability on Real Numbers

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to close the gap existing between the theory of computable analysis and actual computation. In order to study computability over real numbers we use several tools peculiar to the theory of programming languages. In particular we introduce a special kind of typed lambda calculus as an appropriate formalism for describing computations on real numbers. Furthermore we use domain theory, to give semantics to this typed lambda calculus and as a conseguence to give a notion of computability on real numbers. We discuss the adequacy of Scott-Domains as domains for representing real numbers. We relate the Scott topology on such domains to the euclidean topology on IR. Domain theory turns out to be useful also in the study of higher order functions. In particular one of the most important results contained in this thesis concerns the characterisation of the topological properties of the computable higher order functions on reals. Our approach allows moreover to phrase and discuss w.r.t. real numbers issues of programming languages. We address the problem of defining an implementation of real numbers as an abstract data type. Finally we investigate algorithms for carrying out efficient computations on reals.