A monad for full ground reference cells

Conference item

We present a denotational account of dynamic allocation of potentially cyclic memory cells using a monad on a functor category. We identify the collection of heaps as an object in a different functor category equipped with a monad for adding hiding/encapsulation capabilities to the heaps. We derive a monad for full ground references supporting effect masking by applying a state monad transformer to the encapsulation monad. To evaluate the monad, we present a denotational semantics for a call-by-value calculus with full ground references, and validate associated code transformations.

Authors: Kammar, O; Levy, P; Moss, S; Staton, S

• Publication status: In press
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Host title: 32nd Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science
• Journal: 32nd Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science.
• Publication date: 2017-06-01
• Acceptance date: 2017-03-22