Relating Two Semantics of Locally Scoped Names

Authors Steffen Lösch, Andrew M. Pitts



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Steffen Lösch
Andrew M. Pitts

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Steffen Lösch and Andrew M. Pitts. Relating Two Semantics of Locally Scoped Names. In Computer Science Logic (CSL'11) - 25th International Workshop/20th Annual Conference of the EACSL. Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 12, pp. 396-411, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2011)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CSL.2011.396

Abstract

The operational semantics of programming constructs involving locally scoped names typically makes use of stateful "dynamic allocation": a set of currently-used names forms part of the state and upon entering a scope the set is augmented by a new name bound to the scoped identifier. More abstractly, one can see this as a transformation of local scopes by expanding them outward to an implicit top-level. By contrast, in a neglected paper from 1994, Odersky gave a stateless lambda calculus with locally scoped names whose dynamics contracts scopes inward. The properties of "Odersky-style" local names are quite different from dynamically allocated ones and it has not been clear, until now, what is the expressive power of Odersky's notion. We show that in fact it provides a direct semantics of locally scoped names from which the more familiar dynamic allocation semantics can be obtained by continuation-passing style (CPS) translation. More precisely, we show that there is a CPS translation of typed lambda calculus with dynamically allocated names (the Pitts-Stark nu-calculus) into Odersky's lambda-nu-calculus which is computationally adequate with respect to observational equivalence in the two calculi.
Keywords
  • local names
  • continuations
  • typed lambda-calculus
  • observational equivalence

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