Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze dell'Informazione
A Lazy Approach to Partial Algebras
M. Cerioli .
In G. Reggio, E. Astesiano and A. Tarlecki, editors, Recent
Trends in Data Type Specification, number 906 in Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, pages 188--202, Berlin, 1995. Springer Verlag.
Starting from the analysis of which features are required by an algebraic
formalism to describe at least the more common data types used in imperative
and functional programming, a framework is proposed, collecting many techniques
and ideas from the algebraic community, with the capability for an immediate
representation of partiality and error-recovery.
This formalism, of so called lazy algebras, inherits mainly from two parents:
partial and label algebras; from the former especially on a technical side
and from the later from a philosophical point of view.
But, as all children, it has its own individuality and in particular an original
mechanism to represent lazy evaluation in an algebraic framework has
been introduced.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
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