Abstract

Abstract. We describe a language-independent theory for name binding and resolution, suitable for programming languages with complex scop-ing rules including both lexical scoping and modules. We formulate name resolution as a two-stage problem. First a language-independent scope graph is constructed using language-specific rules from an abstract syn-tax tree. Then references in the scope graph are resolved to correspond-ing declarations using a language-independent resolution process. We introduce a resolution calculus as a concise, declarative, and language-independent specification of name resolution. We develop a resolution algorithm that is sound and complete with respect to the calculus. Based on the resolution calculus we develop language-independent definitions of α-equivalence and rename refactoring. We illustrate the approach us-ing a small example language with modules. In addition, we show how our approach provides a model for a range of name binding patterns in existing languages. 1