Recursive Schemes, Krivine Machines, and Collapsible Pushdown Automata

Abstract

Higher-order recursive schemes are an interesting method of approximating program semantics. The semantics of a scheme is an infinite tree labeled with built-in constants. This tree represents the meaning of the program up to the meaning of built-in constants. It is much easier to reason about properties of such trees than properties of interpreted programs. Moreover some interesting properties of programs are already expressible on the level of these trees. Collapsible pushdown automata (CPDA) give another way of generating the same class of trees. We present a relatively simple translation from recursive schemes to CPDA using Krivine machines as an intermediate step. The later are general machines for describing computation of the weak head normal form in the lambda-calculus. They provide the notions of closure and environment that facilitate reasoning about computation.