How Many Realities Fit Into a Program? - Notes on the Meaning of Meaning for Programs

Abstract

Programs are written in programming languages with a certain well defined semantics that describes how an interpreter or a machine will operate based on the program. Higher level programming languages and especially objectoriented programming languages encourage programmers to write programs that contain knowledge and have meaning in an additional sense. This meaning of program elements, their identifier and the terms from which identifiers are built is the topic of this paper. Programs gather knowledge of different realities. There is at least an application domain and a technical domain. If we want to make the knowledge within a program more explicit and accessible, we need to differentiate, which program element refers to which domain.