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A rigid loop is a for-loop with a counter not accessible to the loop body or any other part of a program. Special instructions for rigid loops are introduced on top of the syntax of the program algebra PGA. Two different semantic projections are provided and proven equivalent. One of these is taken to have definitional status on the basis of two criteria: `normative semantic adequacy and `indicative algorithmic adequacy.
Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) are a committed-choice declarative language which has been designed for writing constraint solvers. A CHR program consists of multi-headed guarded rules which allow one to rewrite constraints into simpler ones until a solved form is reached. CHR has received a considerable attention, both from the practical and from the theoretical side. Nevertheless, due the use of multi-headed clauses, there are several aspects of the CHR semantics which have not been clarified yet. In particular, no compositional semantics for CHR has been defined so far. In this paper we introduce a fix-point semantics which characterizes the input/output behavior of a CHR program and which is and-compositional, that is, which allows to retrieve the semantics of a conjunctive query from the semantics of its components. Such a semantics can be used as a basis to define incremental and modular analysis and verification tools.
We propose a general proof technique to show that a predicate is sound, that is, prevents stuck computation, with respect to a big-step semantics. This result may look surprising, since in big-step semantics there is no difference between non-terminating and stuck computations, hence soundness cannot even be expressed. The key idea is to define constructions yielding an extended version of a given arbitrary big-step semantics, where the difference is made explicit. The extended semantics are exploited in the meta-theory, notably they are necessary to show that the proof technique works. However, they remain transparent when using the proof technique, since it consists in checking three conditions on the original rules only, as we illustrate by several examples.
We make a formal analogy between random sampling and fresh name generation. We show that quasi-Borel spaces, a model for probabilistic programming, can soundly interpret Starks $ u$-calculus, a calculus for name generation. Moreover, we prove that this semantics is fully abstract up to first-order types. This is surprising for an off-the-shelf model, and requires a novel analysis of probability distributions on function spaces. Our tools are diverse and include descriptive set theory and normal forms for the $ u$-calculus.
It is well-known that big-step semantics is not able to distinguish stuck and non-terminating computations. This is a strong limitation as it makes very difficult to reason about properties involving infinite computations, such as type soundness, which cannot even be expressed. We show that this issue is only apparent: the distinction between stuck and diverging computations is implicit in any big-step semantics and it just needs to be uncovered. To achieve this goal, we develop a systematic study of big-step semantics: we introduce an abstract definition of what a big-step semantics is, we define a notion of computation by formalising the evaluation algorithm implicitly associated with any big-step semantics, and we show how to canonically extend a big-step semantics to characterise stuck and diverging computations. Building on these notions, we describe a general proof technique to show that a predicate is sound, that is, it prevents stuck computation, with respect to a big-step semantics. One needs to check three properties relating the predicate and the semantics and, if they hold, the predicate is sound. The extended semantics are essential to establish this meta-logical result, but are of no concerns to the user, who only needs to prove the three properties of the initial big-step semantics. Finally, we illustrate the technique by several examples, showing that it is applicable also in cases where subject reduction does not hold, hence the standard technique for small-step semantics cannot be used.
It has been an open question as to whether the Modular Structural Operational Semantics framework can express the dynamic semantics of call/cc. This paper shows that it can, and furthermore, demonstrates that it can express the more general delimited control operators control and shift.