. In lazy functional languages, ? is typically an element of every type. While this provides great flexibility, it also comes at a cost. In this paper we explore the consequences of allowing unpointed types in a lazy functional language like Haskell. We use the type (and class) system to keep track of pointedness, and show the consequences for parametricity and for controlling evaluation order and unboxing. 1 Introduction Ever since Scott and others showed how to use pointed CPOs (i.e. with bottoms) to give meaning to general recursion, both over values (including functions), and over types themselves, functional languages seem to have been wedded to the concept. Languages like Haskell [5] model types by appropriate CPOs and, because non-terminating computations can happen at any type, all the CPOs are pointed. This gives significant flexibility. In particular, values of any type may be defined using recursion. 1.1 Parametricity There are associated costs, however. When reason...

Abstract. This paper proves correctness of Nöcker’s method of strictness analysis, implemented for Clean, which is an effective way for strictness analysis in lazy functional languages based on their operational semantics. We improve upon the work of Clark, Hankin and Hunt, which addresses correctness of the abstract reduction rules. Our method also addresses the cycle detection rules, which are the main strength of Nöcker’s strictness analysis. We reformulate Nöcker’s strictness analysis algorithm in a higherorder lambda-calculus with case, constructors, letrec, and a nondeterministic choice operator ⊕ used as a union operator. Furthermore, the calculus is expressive enough to represent abstract constants like Top or Inf. The operational semantics is a small-step semantics and equality of expressions is defined by a contextual semantics that observes termination of expressions. The correctness of several reductions is proved using a context lemma and complete sets of forking and commuting diagrams.