Semantics of memory management for polymorphic languages
Greg Morrisett, Robert W. Harper · 1999
The views and conclusions contained in this document arethose of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing o cial policies, either expressed or implied, of the Advanced We present a static and dynamic semantics for an abstract machine that evaluates expressions of a polymorphic programming language. Unlike traditional semantics, our abstract machine exposes many important issues of memory management, such as value sharing and control representation. We prove the soundness of the static semantics with respect to the dynamic semantics using traditional techniques. We then show how these same techniques may be used to establish the soundness of various memory management strategies, including type-based, tag-free garbage collection� tail-call elimination � and environment strengthening. Keywords: management Type theory and operational semantics are remarkably e ective tools for programming