Term Rewriting Semantics of Lazy Functional Programming Languages
Sugwoo Byun · Jeongbo gwahaghoe nonmunji. si'seu'tem mich i'lon · 2008
Most functional programming languages allows programmers to write ambiguous rules, under the strategy that pattern-matching will be performed in a direction of 'from top to bottom' way. While providing programmers with convenience and intuitive understanding of defining default rules, such ambiguous rules may make the semantics of functional languages unclear. More specifically, it may fail to apply the equational reasoning, one of most significant advantage of functional programming, and may cause to obscure finding a formal way of translating functional languages into the -calculus; as a result, we only get an ad hoc translation. In this paper, we associate with separability of term rewriting systems, holding purely-declarative property, pattern-matching semantics of lazy functional languages. Separability can serve a formalism for translating lazy functional languages into the -calculus.