Jon Dewey
What exactly is “intensional programming?” The easy answer is, programming in a language based on intensional logic. But that raises another, more important question, namely what is intensional logic? Logicians have been working on the answer for more than 2500 years.
The short answer is, logic in which the truth-value and more generally the meaning of an expression depends on an implicit context. Let me attempt to give you the full answer.
The term “intensional” itself is relatively recent. Carnap introduced it in the 1930s, based on Frege’s distinction between the “sense” and the “denotation” of an expression. In Frege’s terminology the denotation of an expression is just that – the particular object it (currently) denotes. (This is what Carnap and modern logicians call the “extension”). For example, “the President of France” currently [2021] denotes Emmanuel Macron.