Abstract

Much work has been done on the semantics of programs with local state. Most of this work involves complex storage modeling with pointers and memory cells, complicated categorical constructions, and reasoning in the presence of context. We show how a relatively simple relational semantics can be used to avoid these complications. We provide a natural relational semantics for a programming language with higherorder functions. We define a purely compositional semantics based on binary and ternary relations such that all contextual considerations are completely encapsulated in the state. We show several equivalence proofs using this semantics based on examples of Meyer and Sieber (1988).

Citations