Questions of definedness are ubiquitous in mathematics. Informally, these involve reasoning about expressions which may or may not have a value. This paper surveys work on logics in which such reasoning can be carried out directly, especially in computational contexts. It begins with a general logic of partial terms, continues with partial combinatory and lambda calculi, and concludes with an expressively rich theory of partial functions and polymorphic types, where termination of functional programs can be established in a natural way.

The paper studies a domain theoretical notion of primitive recursion over partial sequences in the context of Scott domains. Based on a non-monotone coding of partial sequences, this notion supports a rich concept of parallelism in the sense of Plotkin. The complexity of these functions is analysed by a hierarchy of classes ${\cal E}^{\bot}_n$ similar to the Grzegorczyk classes. The functions considered are characterised by a function algebra ${\cal R}^{\bot}$ generated by continuity preserving operations starting from computable initial functions. Its (...) layers ${\cal R}^{\bot}_n$ are related to those above by showing $\forall n \ge 2.{\cal E}^{\bot}_{n+1} ={\cal R}^{\bot}_n$ , thus generalising results of Schwichtenberg/Müller and Niggl. (shrink)