Abstract

this paper we regard the following as synonyms: references, program variables, pointers, locations, and unary cells) to a programming language complicates life. Adding them to the simply typed lambda calculus causes the failure of most of the nice mathematical properties and some of the more basic rules (such as j). For example strong normalization fails since it is possible, for each provably non--empty function type, to construct a Y --combinator for that type. References also interact unpleasantly with polymorphism [34, 35]. They are also troublesome from a denotational point of view as illustrated by the lack of fully abstract models. For example, in [22] Meyer and Sieber give a series of examples of programs that are operationally equivalent (according to the intended semantics of block-structured Algol-like programs) but which are not given equivalent denotations in traditional denotational semantics. They propose various modifications to the denotational semantics which solve some of these discrepancies, but not all. In [27, 26] a denotational semantics that overcomes some of these problems is presented. However variations on the seventh example remain problematic. Since numerous proof systems for Algol are sound for the denotational models in question, [8, 7, 32, 28, 16, 27, 26], these equivalences, if expressible, must be independent of these systems. The problem which motivated Meyer and Sieber's paper, [22], was to provide mathematical justification for the informal but convincing proofs of the operational equivalence of their examples. In this paper we approach the same problem, but from an operational rather than denotational perspective. This paper accomplishes two goals. Firstly, we present the first-order part of a new logic for reasoning about programs....

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