Abstract
The non-deterministic lambda-calculus is a tiny core language in terms of which all the declaratively understood constructs of constraint functional languages may be defined. This paper describes a denotational semantics based on lower powerdomains, and a polymorphic type system. The calculus has a confluent operational semantics, which may be formulated in several ways—an extension of de Bruijn’s calculus is used here.
More useful language constructs may be defined in terms of the core language. The aim of this translation is not to give an implementation—higher-level languages will typically provide efficient implementations of the specific features they provide. Rather the translation to the core language gives a semantics for the higher-level constructs, and provides a standard against which their implementations may be judged. Similarly, transformations at the higher-level may be justified by translating them to transformations proved correct for the core.
This work was supported by Esprit Basic Research Action 3147: Phoenix.
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© 1992 Springer-Verlag London
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Paterson, R. (1992). A Tiny Functional Language with Logical Features. In: Darlington, J., Dietrich, R. (eds) Declarative Programming, Sasbachwalden 1991. Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3794-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3794-8_5
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