research-article

Safe corecursion in coFJ

Authors:

Elena ZuccaAuthors Info & Claims

FTfJP '13: Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs

Article No.: 2, Pages 1 - 7

https://doi.org/10.1145/2489804.2489807

Published: 01 July 2013 Publication History

Abstract

In previous work we have presented coFJ, an extension to Featherweight Java that promotes coinductive programming, a sub-paradigm expressly devised to ease high-level programming and reasoning with cyclic data structures.

The coFJ language supports cyclic objects and regularly corecursive methods, that is, methods whose invocation terminates not only when the corresponding call trace is finite (as happens with ordinary recursion), but also when such a trace is infinite but cyclic, that is, can be specified by a regular term, or, equivalently, by a finite set of recursive syntactic equations.

In coFJ it is not easy to ensure that the invocation of a corecursive method will return a well-defined value, since the recursive equations corresponding to the regular trace of the recursive calls may not admit a (unique) solution; in such cases we say that the value returned by the method call is undetermined.

In this paper we propose two new contributions. First, we design a simpler construct for defining corecursive methods and, correspondingly, provide a more intuitive operational semantics. For this coFJ variant, we are able to define a type system that allows the user to specify that certain corecursive methods cannot return an undetermined value; in this way, it is possible to prevent unsafe use of such a value.

The operational semantics and the type system of coFJ are fully formalized, and the soundness of the type system is proved.

References

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Cited By

DOWNEN PARIOLA Z(2023)Classical (co)recursion: MechanicsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682200016833Online publication date: 4-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796822000168
Ancona DDagnino FZucca E(2017)Extending Coinductive Logic Programming with Co-FactsElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.258.1258(1-18)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.258.1
Ancona DDagnino FZucca E(2017)Generalizing Inference Systems by CoaxiomsProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-662-54434-1_2(29-55)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54434-1_2
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Safe corecursion in coFJ
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
      1. Semantics
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program constructs
      1. Type structures
    2. Program semantics
      1. Operational semantics

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FTfJP '13: Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs

July 2013

52 pages

ISBN:9781450320429

DOI:10.1145/2489804

Program Chair:
Werner Dietl
University of Washington

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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CNRS: Centre National De La Rechercue Scientifique
UM2: University Montpellier 2
AITO: Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 July 2013

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Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca

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ECOOP '13

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CNRS
UM2
AITO

ECOOP '13: European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming

July 1, 2013

Montpellier, France

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FTfJP '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 7 of 14 submissions, 50%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 51 of 75 submissions, 68%

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Cited By

DOWNEN PARIOLA Z(2023)Classical (co)recursion: MechanicsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682200016833Online publication date: 4-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796822000168
Ancona DDagnino FZucca E(2017)Extending Coinductive Logic Programming with Co-FactsElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.258.1258(1-18)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.258.1
Ancona DDagnino FZucca E(2017)Generalizing Inference Systems by CoaxiomsProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-662-54434-1_2(29-55)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54434-1_2
Ancona DDagnino FZucca E(2016)Towards a model of corecursion with defaultProceedings of the 18th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs10.1145/2955811.2955820(1-6)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2955811.2955820

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