Issue Theoret. Informatics Appl. Volume 38, Number 4, October-December 2004 Fixed Points in Computer Science (FICS'03) Page(s) 375 - 400 DOI 10.1051/ita:2004018

Theoret. Informatics Appl. 38, 375-400 (2004)
DOI: 10.1051/ita:2004018

An abstract monadic semantics for value recursion

Eugenio Moggi¹ and Amr Sabry<sup>2

1</sup>  DISI, Universitá di Genova, Italy; moggi@disi.unige.it.
²  Departement of Computer Science, Indiana University, USA; sabry@indiana.edu.

Abstract
This paper proposes an operational semantics for value recursion in the context of monadic metalanguages. Our technique for combining value recursion with computational effects works uniformly for all monads. The operational nature of our approach is related to the implementation of recursion in Scheme and its monadic version proposed by Friedman and Sabry, but it defines a different semantics and does not rely on assignments. When contrasted to the axiomatic approach proposed by Erkök and Launchbury, our semantics for the continuation monad invalidates one of the axioms, adding to the evidence that this axiom is problematic in the presence of continuations.

Mathematics Subject Classification. 68N18, 68Q55.


© EDP Sciences 2004

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