Coinductive big-step operational semantics

  • Authors:
  • Xavier Leroy;Hervé Grall

  • Affiliations:
  • INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, Domaine de Voluceau, B.P. 105, 78153 Le Chesnay Cedex, France;École des Mines de Nantes, La Chantrerie, 4, rue Alfred Kastler, B.P. 20722, 44307 Nantes, France

  • Venue:
  • Information and Computation
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Using a call-by-value functional language as an example, this article illustrates the use of coinductive definitions and proofs in big-step operational semantics, enabling it to describe diverging evaluations in addition to terminating evaluations. We formalize the connections between the coinductive big-step semantics and the standard small-step semantics, proving that both semantics are equivalent. We then study the use of coinductive big-step semantics in proofs of type soundness and proofs of semantic preservation for compilers. A methodological originality of this paper is that all results have been proved using the Coq proof assistant. We explain the proof-theoretic presentation of coinductive definitions and proofs offered by Coq, and show that it facilitates the discovery and the presentation of the results.