Metric completion versus ideal completion

Complete partial orders have been used for a long time for defining semantics of programming languages. In the context of concurrency de Bakker and Zucker (1982) proposed a metric setting for handling concurrency, recursion and nontermination, which has proved to be very successful in many applications. Starting with a semantic domain D for ‘finite behaviour’ we investigate the relation between the ideal completion Idl(D) and the metric completion which are both suitable to model recursion and infinite behaviour. We also consider the properties of semantic operators.