ion for the Lazy -calculus Samson Abramsky Guy McCusker Department of Computing Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine 180 Queen's Gate London SW7 2BZ United Kingdom Abstract We define a category of games G, and its extensional quotient E . A model of the lazy -calculus, a type-free functional language based on evaluation to weak head normal form, is given in G, yielding an extensional model in E . This model is shown to be fully abstract with respect to applicative simulation. This is, so far as we know, the first purely semantic construction of a fully abstract model for a reflexively-typed sequential language. 1 Introduction Full Abstraction is a key concept in programming language semantics [9, 12, 23, 26]. The ingredients are as follows. We are given a language L, with an `observational preorder' - on terms in L such that P - Q means that every observable property of P is also satisfied by Q; and a denotational model MJ\DeltaK. The model M is then said to be f...

Machines Th. STREICHER Fachbereich 4 Mathematik, TU Darmstadt, Schlossgartenstr. 7, 64289 Darmstadt, streiche@mathematik.th-darmstadt.de B. REUS Institut fur Informatik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Oettingenstr. 67, D-80538 Munchen, reus@informatik.uni-muenchen.de Abstract One of the goals of this paper is to demonstrate that denotational semantics is useful for operational issues like implementation of functional languages by abstract machines. This is exemplified in a tutorial way by studying the case of extensional untyped call-byname -calculus with Felleisen's control operator C. We derive the transition rules for an abstract machine from a continuation semantics which appears as a generalization of the ::-translation known from logic. The resulting abstract machine appears as an extension of Krivine's Machine implementing head reduction. Though the result, namely Krivine's Machine, is well known our method of deriving it from continuation semantics is new and applicable to other languages (as e.g. call-by-value variants).

Machine The semantics presented in this section is essentially Sestoft's \mark 1" abstract machine for laziness [Sestoft 1997]. In that paper, he proves his abstract machine 6 A. K. Moran and D. Sands h fx = Mg; x; S i ! h ; M; #x : S i (Lookup) h ; V; #x : S i ! h fx = V g; V; S i (Update) h ; M x; S i ! h ; M; x : S i (Unwind) h ; x:M; y : S i ! h ; M [ y = x ]; S i (Subst) h ; case M of alts ; S i ! h ; M; alts : S i (Case) h ; c j ~y; fc i ~x i N i g : S i ! h ; N j [ ~y = ~x j ]; S i (Branch) h ; let f~x = ~ Mg in N; S i ! h f~x = ~ Mg; N; S i ~x dom(;S) (Letrec) Fig. 1. The abstract machine semantics for call-by-need. semantics sound and complete with respect to Launchbury's natural semantics, and we will not repeat those proofs here. Transitions are over congurations consisting of a heap, containing bindings, the expression currently being evaluated, and a stack. The heap is a partial function from variables to terms, and denoted in an identical manner to a coll...

We investigate functional computation as a special form of concurrent computation.

. This paper is about the relationship between the theory of monadic types and the practice of concurrent functional programming. We present a typed functional programming language CMML, with a type system based on Moggi's monadic metalanguage, and concurrency based on Reppy's Concurrent ML. We present an operational and denotational semantics for the language, and show that the denotational semantics is fully abstract for may-testing. We show that a fragment of CML can be translated into CMML, and that the translation is correct up to weak bisimulation. Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 Mathematical preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.1 Categories and monads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2 Partial orders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

This paper introduces an operational semantics for call-by-need reduction in terms of Milner's ß-calculus. The functional programming interest lies in the use of ß-calculus as an abstract yet realistic target language. The practical value of the encoding is demonstrated with an outline for a parallel code generator. From a theoretical perspective, the ß-calculus representation of computational strategies with shared reductions is novel and solves a problem posed by Milner [13]. The compactness of the process calculus presentation makes it interesting as an alternative definition of call-by-need. Correctness of the encoding is proved with respect to the call-by-need -calculus of Ariola et al. [3]. 1 Introduction Graph reduction of extended -calculi has become a mature field of applied research. The efficiency of the implementations is due in great measure to a technique known as `sharing', whereby argument values are computed (at most) once and then memoized for future reference. Both...

Call-by-need lambda calculi with letrec provide a rewriting-based operational semantics for (lazy) call-by-name functional languages. These calculi model the sharing behavior during evaluation more closely than let-based calculi that use a fixpoint combinator. In a previous paper we showed that the copy-transformation is correct for the small calculus LRλ. In this paper we demonstrate that the proof method based on a calculus on infinite trees for showing correctness of instantiation operations can be extended to the calculus LRCCλ with case and constructors, and show that copying at compile-time can be done without restrictions. We also show that the call-by-need and call-by-name strategies are equivalent w.r.t. contextual equivalence. A consequence is correctness of all the transformations like instantiation, inlining, specialization and common subexpression elimination in LRCCλ. We are confident that the method scales up for proving correctness of copy-related transformations in non-deterministic lambda calculi if restricted to “deterministic” subterms.

Indeterminism is typical for concurrent computation. If several concurrent actors compete for the same resource then at most one of them may succeed, whereby the choice of the successful actor is indeterministic. As a consequence, the execution of a concurrent program may be nonconfluent. Even worse, most observables (termination, computational result, and time complexity) typically depend on the scheduling of actors created during program execution. This property contrast concurrent programs from purely functional programs. A functional program is uniformly confluent in the sense that all its possible executions coincide modulo reordering of execution steps. In this paper, we investigate concurrent programs that are uniformly confluent and their relation to eager and lazy functional programs.

Abstract. This paper shows the equivalence of applicative similarity and contextual approximation, and hence also of bisimilarity and contextual equivalence, in the deterministic call-by-need lambda calculus with letrec. Bisimilarity simplifies equivalence proofs in the calculus and opens a way for more convenient correctness proofs for program transformations. Although this property may be a natural one to expect, to the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first one providing a proof. The proof technique is to transfer and surjective translation. This also shows that the natural embedding of Abramsky’s lazy lambda calculus into the call-by-need lambda calculus with letrec is an isomorphism between the respective term-models. We show that the equivalence property proven in this paper transfers to a call-by-need letrec calculus developed by Ariola and Felleisen. 1.

This paper introduces an alternative representation for λ-terms which has the notable property that the search for the leftmost outermost redex is restricted to two steps. This is important in the implementation of a lazy functional programming language, as this search consumes time and space. The representation introduced is similar to that resulting from the implementation technique of reversing pointers in the left spine of a term while traversing it, except that here the pointers in the left spine are reversed before reduction. This paper completely develops this new representation, including rigourous proofs of the correctness as a representation for -terms and a number of properties, such as the restriction on the search for the next redex. It is shown that the representation can be used with graphs, hence it can be used as the basis for an implementation of a lazy functional language. An implementation is introduced and its performance is compared with a conventional implementati...