> Does anyone know where the following paper was published?
>
> "Nondeterminism with Referential Transparency in Functional
> Programming Languages" 1984
> F. Warren Burton
> Dept of EE and CS
> Univ of Colorado at Denver
Yes, Computer Journal 31, 3 (1988) 243-247.
However, there may be a problem with Theorem 1 (and its proof), as the
proof ignores the possibility that the decision d is free (and thus
neither one, two, or undefined).
Section 5 on implementation also makes one wonder what the expression
choice(d, choice(d, 1, 2), choice(d, 3, 4))
may evaluate to, or whether its evaluation using the parallel
semaphore implementation may deadlock. Surely this problem could be
corrected, though.
> Better yet, can you point me to more recent work on the use of
> nondeterminism in FP? I am only interested in techniques which do
> not break functional semantics.
H. Sondergaard and I have written two papers that you might find
useful, also in determining what "functional semantics" may mean: one
paper on parameter passing mechanisms in nondeterministic functional
languages [Soendergaard:93:Non-Determinism], and one on the notion of
referential transparency in general
[Soendergaard:90:ReferentialTransparency]. The former is still
unpublished, unfortunately, but I can send you a copy of the Tech
Report version if you wish. The latter is nitpicking at a high level,
but I think it may be interesting anyway.
Yours,
Peter Sestoft
@Article{Soendergaard:90:ReferentialTransparency,
author = "H. S{\o}ndergaard and P. Sestoft",
title = "Referential Transparency, Definiteness and Unfoldability",
journal = "Acta Informatica",
year = "1990",
volume = "27",
pages = "505-517",
note = ""}
@Article{Soendergaard:93:Non-Determinism,
author = "H. S{\o}ndergaard and P. Sestoft",
title = "Non-Determinism in Functional Languages",
journal = "Computer Journal",
year = "1993(?)",
OPTvolume = "",
OPTnumber = "",
OPTpages = "",
OPTmonth = "",
note = "Accepted, to appear. Also Technical Report 88/18, Department
of Computer Science, University of Melbourne,
Australia, 1988"}
--
Peter Sestoft * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Department of Computer Science
Technical University of Denmark, Building 344 DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark
Tel: +45 45 93 33 32 * Direct: +45 45 93 12 22/3749 * Fax: +45 42 88 45 30
