ACM Transactions on Computational Logic· 2026Q2
Non-Deterministic Abstract Machines
- 3citations
- Q2SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
A generic design for abstract machines that execute non-deterministic programming languages (like process calculi or lambda calculus) is presented, featuring explicit non-deterministic choices and backtracking, guaranteed to terminate via term annotations.
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Key points
- Presents a generic abstract machine design for non-deterministic programming languages.
- Machines make non-deterministic choices and backtrack from irreducible subterms.
- Termination is guaranteed through introduced term annotations.
- Machines are automatically derived from zipper semantics, ensuring soundness and completeness.
- Zipper semantics can be generated from standard reduction semantics.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
We present a generic design of abstract machines for non-deterministic programming languages such as process calculi or the lambda calculus with full non-deterministic \(\beta\) -reduction. Such a machine traverses a term in the search for a redex, making non-deterministic choices when several paths are possible and backtracking when it reaches a dead end, i.e., an irreducible subterm. The search is guaranteed to terminate thanks to term annotations the machine introduces along the way. We show how to automatically derive a non-deterministic abstract machine from a zipper semantics—a form of structural operational semantics in which the decomposition process of a term into a context and a redex is made explicit. The derivation method ensures the soundness and completeness of the machines w.r.t. the zipper semantics. Zipper semantics themselves can be generated from a reduction semantics, a format commonly used to describe the semantics of sequential languages, in particular effectful ones.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Computational Theory and Mathematics
Computational Theory and MathematicsComputer Science