Abstract
For pragmatic reasons it is useful to exclude the identity relation from the ‘implementable subset’ of Ruby. However there are many expressions in the relational calculus whose natural meaning is just this identity relation. This note gives an identity-free account of some of these expressions, and shows that there is no satisfactory identity-free account of some others. This is an exercise in writing about Ruby without drawing any pictures, in part because it is about those expressions which would correspond to blank pictures.
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References
Geraint Jones and Mary Sheeran, Circuit design in Ruby in Jurgen Staunstrup (ed.), Formal methods for VLSI design,North-Holland, 1990. pp. 13–70.
Graham Hutton and Ed Voermans, A calculational theory of pers as types, University of Glasgow Computing Science Research Report 1992/R1.
Ed Voermans and Jaap van der Woude, Relational theory of datatypes: the per version, (unpublished).
Alan Jeffreys, Soft arrays, in The Squiggolist, 1. 4, June 1990.
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© 1993 British Computer Society
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Jones, G., Sheeran, M. (1993). A Certain Loss of Identity. In: Launchbury, J., Sansom, P. (eds) Functional Programming, Glasgow 1992. Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3215-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3215-8_10
Publisher Name: Springer, London
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