On Probabilistic λ-Calculi
Ugo Dal Lago · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020
Church's λ-calculus has become a universally accepted model of pure functional programming, and its properties have been thoroughly scrutinised by the research community in the last 90 years. Many variations of it have been introduced for the sake of capturing programming with various forms of effects, thus going beyond pure functional programming. This chapter is meant to be a gentle introduction to a family of such calculi, namely probabilistic λ-calculi, in their two main variations: randomised λ-calculi and Bayesian λ-calculi. We focus our attention on the operational semantics, expressive power and termination properties of randomised λ-calculi, only giving some hints and references about denotational models and Bayesian λ-calculi.