V→M: A Virtual Machine for Strict Evaluation of (Co)Recursive Functions

Abstract

AbstractCorecursive definitions are usually only meaningful in functional languages with lazy evaluation semantics, because their domain and range may contain cyclic data graphs. By inspection of the call stack, it is possible in a strict evaluation environment to detect cycles in a computation, and thus transform finite input graphs infinite time. This paper presents a virtual machine with suitable cycle handling primitives and operational semantics to implement strict evaluation of corecursive functions. We discuss the impact on calling conventions and definition constructs, and demonstrate the relevance of the introduced features by application to the domain of infinite precision decimal arithmetics.KeywordsVirtual MachineOutput ParameterRecursive FunctionFunctional LanguageCycle DetectionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.