V→M: A virtual machine for strict evaluation of (Co) recursive functions

Abstract

Corecursive 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 in finite 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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.