Structured Operational Semantics of a fragment of the language Scheme

Authors:
Furio Honsell;Alberto Pravato;Simona Ronchi Della Rocca
Affiliations:
Università/ di Udine, Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, via Delle Scienze 208 - Udine, Italy/ (e-mail: honsell@dimi.uniud.it);Università/ di Torino, Dipartimento di Informatica, C.so Svizzera 185 - Torino, Italy/ (e-mail: {pravato,ronchi}@di.unito.it);Università/ di Torino, Dipartimento di Informatica, C.so Svizzera 185 - Torino, Italy/ (e-mail: {pravato,ronchi}@di.unito.it)
Venue:
Journal of Functional Programming
Year:
1998

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Abstract

In this paper we give a big-step Structured Operational Semantics (SOS), in the style of Plotkin, Kahn and Milner, of a significant fragment of the functional programming language Scheme, including quote, eval, quasiquote and unquote. The SOS formalism allows us to discuss incrementally the various features of the language and to keep a low mathematical overhead, thus producing a rigorous account of the semantics of a ‘real’ programming language, which nonetheless has a pedagogical value. More specifically, we formalize four strictly increasing fragments of Scheme, using a number of formal systems which express the evaluation of expressions, the display of output results, and the handling of errors.