A non-deterministic call-by-need lambda calculus

  • Authors:

  • Arne Kutzner;Manfred Schmidt-Schauß

  • Affiliations:

  • Fachbereich Informatik, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Postfach 11 19 32, D-60054 Frankfurt, Germany;Fachbereich Informatik, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Postfach 11 19 32, D-60054 Frankfurt, Germany

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

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Abstract

In this paper we present a non-deterministic call-by-need (untyped) lambda calculus λnd with a constant choice and a let-syntax that models sharing. Our main result is that λnd has the nice operational properties of the standard lambda calculus: confluence on sets of expressions, and normal order reduction is sufficient to reach head normal form. Using a strong contextual equivalence we show correctness of several program transformations. In particular of lambda-lifting using deterministic maximal free expressions. These results show that λnd is a new and also natural combination of non-determinism and lambda-calculus, which has a lot of opportunities for parallel evaluation.An intended application of λnd is as a foundation for compiling lazy functional programming languages with I/O based on direct calls. The set of correct program transformations can be rigorously distinguished from non-correct ones. All program transformations are permitted with the slight exception that for transformations like common subexpression elimination and lambda-lifting with maximal free expressions the involved subexpressions have to be deterministic ones.