Nominal Techniques
Programming languages abound with features making use of names in
various ways. There is a mathematical foundation for the semantics
of such features which uses groups of permutations of names and the
notion of the support of an object with respect to the action of such
a group. The relevance of this kind of mathematics for the semantics
of names is perhaps not immediately obvious. That it is relevant and
useful has emerged over the last 15 years or so in a body of work that
has acquired its own name: nominal techniques. At the same time, the
application of these techniques has broadened from semantics to
computation theory in general. This article introduces the subject and
is based upon a tutorial at LICS-ICALP 2015.