Sequential and concurrent abstract machines for interaction nets

Abstract

This paper is a formal study of how to implement interaction nets, filling an important gap in the work on this graphical rewriting formalism, very promising for the implementation of languages based on the λ-calculus. We propose the first abstract machine for interaction net reduction, based on a decomposition of interaction rules into more atomic steps, which tackles all the implementation details hidden in the graphical presentation. As a natural extension of this, we then give a concurrent shared-memory abstract machine, and show how to implement it, resulting in the first parallel implementation of interaction nets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.