First-order functional languages and intensional logic

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that first-order functional programs can be transformed into intensional programs of nullary variables, in a semantics preserving way. On the foundational side, the goal of our study is to bring new insights and a better understanding of the nature of functional languages. From a practical point of view, our investigation provides a formal basis for the tagging mechanism that is used in the implementation of first-order functional languages on dataflow machines.