Observable sharing for functional circuit description

Observable sharing for functional circuit description (1999)

by Koen Claessen , David Sands

Venue:	In Asian Computing Science Conference
Citations:	36 - 3 self

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Datum	Value	Source
TITLE	Observable sharing for functional circuit description	INFERENCE
AUTHOR NAME	Koen Claessen	user correction
AUTHOR NAME	David Sands	user correction
ABSTRACT	Pure functional programming languages have been proposed as a vehicle to describe, simulate and manipulate circuit specifications. We propose an extension to Haskell to solve a standard problem when manipulating data types representing circuits in a lazy functional language. The problem is that circuits are finite graphs -- but viewing them as an algebraic (lazy) datatype makes them indistinguishable from potentially infinite regular trees. However, implementations of Haskell do indeed represent cyclic structures by graphs. The problem is that the sharing of nodes that creates such cycles is not observable by any function which traverses such a structure. In this paper we propose an extension to call-by-need languages which makes graph sharing observable. The extension is based on non updatable reference cells and an equality test (sharing detection) on this type. We show that this simple and practical extension has well-behaved semantic properties, which means that many typical source-to-source program transformations, such as might be performed by a compiler, are still valid in the presence of this extension.	user correction
YEAR	1999	INFERENCE
VENUE	In Asian Computing Science Conference	INFERENCE
VENUE TYPE	CONFERENCE	INFERENCE
PAGES	62--73	INFERENCE
CITATIONS	20 found	ParsCit 1.0