Abstract

. A general construction of models of call-by-value from models of call-by-name computation is described. The construction makes essential use of the properties of sum types in common denotational models of call-by-name. When applied to categories of games, it yields fully abstract models of the call-by-value functional language PCFv , which can be extended to incorporate recursive types, and of a language with local references as in Standard ML. 1 Introduction In recent years game semantics has emerged as a novel and intuitively appealing approach to modelling programming languages. Its first success was in providing a syntax-free description of a fully abstract model of PCF [10, 1, 15]; full abstraction results have also been obtained for untyped and recursively typed functional languages, as well as languages with imperative features [12, 3]. However, none of this work addressed the problem of modelling call-by-value languages---a major shortcoming, given that many real-life langua...

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