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Abstracting Definitional Interpreters

Series
International Conference on Functional Programming 2017
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David Darais, University of Maryland, USA, gives the first presentation in the fourth panel, Effects, in the ICFP 2017 conference. Co-written by Nicholas Labich, David Van Horn, Phuc C. Nguyen, University of Maryland, USA.
In this functional pearl, we examine the use of definitional interpreters as a basis for abstract interpretation of higher-order programming languages. As it turns out, definitional interpreters, especially those written in monadic style, can provide a nice basis for a wide variety of collecting semantics, abstract interpretations, symbolic executions, and their intermixings.

But the real insight of this story is a replaying of an insight from Reynold's landmark paper, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages, in which he observes definitional interpreters enable the defined-language to inherit properties of the defining-language. We show the same holds true for definitional abstract interpreters. Remarkably, we observe that abstract definitional interpreters can inherit the so-called 'pushdown control flow' property, wherein function calls and returns are precisely matched in the abstract semantics, simply by virtue of the function call mechanism of the defining-language.

The first approaches to achieve this property for higher-order languages appeared within the last ten years, and have since been the subject of many papers. These approaches start from a state-machine semantics and uniformly involve significant technical engineering to recover the precision of pushdown control flow. In contrast, starting from a definitional interpreter, the pushdown control flow property is inherent in the meta-language and requires no further technical mechanism to achieve.

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International Conference on Functional Programming 2017

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Praveen Narayanan, Indiana University, USA, gives the third presentation in the third panel, Applications, in the ICFP 2017 conference. Co-written by Chung-Chief Shan, Indiana University, USA.
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International Conference on Functional Programming 2017

On the Expressive Power of User-Defined Effects: Effect Handlers, Monadic Reflection, Delimited Control

Ohad Kammar, University of Oxford, UK, gives the second presentation in the fourth panel, Effects, in the ICFP 2017 conference.
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Licence
Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Episode Information

Series
International Conference on Functional Programming 2017
People
David Darais
Keywords
computing
programming
technology
Department: Department of Computer Science
Date Added: 13/12/2017
Duration: 00:19:06

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