Lazy computation with exact real numbers

  • Authors:

  • Abbas Edalat;Peter John Potts;Philipp Sünderhauf

  • Affiliations:

  • Department, of Computing, Imperial College, 180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2BZ, UK;Department, of Computing, Imperial College, 180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2BZ, UK;Department, of Computing, Imperial College, 180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2BZ, UK

  • Venue:
  • ICFP '98 Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

We provide a semantical framework for exact real arithmetic using linear fractional transformations on the extended real line. We present an extension of PCF with a real type which introduces an eventually breadth-first strategy for lazy evaluation of exact real numbers. In this language, we present the constant redundant if, rif, for defining functions by cases which, in contrast to parallel if (pif), overcomes the problem of undecidability of comparison of real numbers in finite time. We use the upper space of the one-point compactification of the real line to develop a denotational semantics for the lazy evaluation of real programs. Finally two adequacy results are proved, one for programs containing rif and one for those not containing it. Our adequacy results in particular provide the proof of correctness of algorithms for computation of single-valued elementary functions.