A Semantics for Program Analysis in Narrowing-Based Functional Logic Languages

by Michael Hanus, Salvador Lucas

Proc. of the 4th Fuji International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming (FLOPS'99), Springer LNCS 1722, pp. 353-368, 1999
© Springer-Verlag

We introduce a denotational characterization of narrowing, the computational engine of many functional logic languages. We use a functional domain for giving a denotation to the narrowing space associated to a given initial expression under an arbitrary narrowing strategy. Such a semantic description highlights (and favours) the operational notion of evaluation instead of the more usual model-theoretic notion of interpretation as the basis for the semantic description. The motivation is to obtain an abstract semantics which encodes information about the real operational framework used by a given (narrowing-based) functional logic language. Our aim is to provide a general, suitable, and accurate framework for the analysis of functional logic programs.

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