A sound reduction semantics for untyped CBN mutli-stage computation. Or, the theory of MetaML is non-trival (extended abstract)

  • Authors:
  • Walid Taha

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computing Science, Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Göteborg, S-412 96 Göteborg, Sweden

  • Venue:
  • PEPM '00 Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

A multi-stage computation is one involving more than one stage of execution. MetaML is a language for programming multi-stage computations. Previous studies presented big-step semantics, categorical semantics, and sound type systems for MetaML. In this paper, we report on a confluent and sound reduction semantics for untyped call-by name (CBN) MetaML. The reduction semantics can be used to formally justify some optimization performed by a CBN MetaML implementation. The reduction semantics demonstrates that non-trivial equalities hold for object-code, even in the untyped setting. The paper also emphasizes that adding intensional analysis (that is, taking-apart object programs) to MetaML remains an interesting open problem.