Abstract not found

Certain programs making use of monads need to perform recursion over the values of monadic actions. Although the do-notation of Haskell provides a convenient framework for monadic programming, it lacks the generality to support such recursive bindings. In this paper, we describe an enhanced translation schema for the donotation and its integration into Haskell. The new translation allows variables to be bound recursively, provided the underlying monad comes equipped with an appropriate fixed-point operator.

Abstract. Monads have been employed in programming languages for modeling various language features, most importantly those that involve side effects. In particular, Haskell’s IO monad provides access to I/O operations and mutable variables, without compromising referential transparency. Cyclic definitions that involve monadic computations give rise to the concept of value-recursion, where the fixed-point computation takes place only over the values, without repeating or losing effects. In this paper, we describe a semantics for a lazy language based on Haskell, supporting monadic I/O, mutable variables, usual recursive definitions, and value recursion. Our semantics is composed of two layers: A natural semantics for the functional layer, and a labeled transition semantics for the IO layer. Mathematics Subject Classification. 68N18, 68Q55, 18C15.