## для моих русских читателей

February 28, 2012

Владислав Натаров <4kcheshirecat@gmail.com> has kindly translated my blog posts to date into Russian.  I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the translation, but I am grateful for the effort, and hope that this will be of interest to my Russian readers.

## Referential Transparency

February 9, 2012

After reading some of the comments on my Words Matter post, I realized that it might be worthwhile to clarify the treatment of references in PFPL. Most people are surprised to learn that I have separated the concept of a reference from the concept of mutable storage. I realize that my treatment is not standard, but I consider that one thing I learned in writing the book is to divorce the concept of a reference from that to which it refers.  Doing so allows for a nicely uniform account of references arising in many disparate situations, and is the basis for, among other things, a non-standard, but I think clearer, treatment of communication in process calculi.  Conventional accounts of references are, in my formulation, references to assignables; I also have references to symbols, to fluids, to channels, and to classifiers, all of which arise naturally and independently of assignment.

It’s not feasible for me to reproduce the entire story here in a short post, so I will confine myself to a few remarks that will perhaps serve as encouragement to read the full story in PFPL.

There is, first of all, a general concept of a symbol, or name, on which much of the development builds. Perhaps the most important thing to realize about symbols in my account is that symbols are not forms of value. They are, rather, a indices for an infinite, open-ended (expansible) family of operators for forming expressions. For example, when one introduces a symbol a as the name of an assignable, what one is doing is introducing two new operators, get[a] and set[a], for getting and setting the contents of that assignable. Similarly, when one introduces a symbol a to be used as a channel name, then one is introducing operators send[a] and receive[a] that act on the channel named a. The point is that these operators interpret the symbol; for example, in the case of mutable state, the get[a] and set[a] operators are what make it be state, as opposed to some other use of the symbol a as an index for some other operator. There is no requirement that the state be formulated using “cells”; one could as well use the framework of algebraic effects pioneered by Plotkin and Power to give a dynamics to these operators. For present purposes I don’t care about how the dynamics is formulated; I only care about the laws that it obeys (this is the essence of the Plotkin/Power approach as I understand it).

Associated with each symbol a is a type that is, I hasten to emphasize not the type of the symbol a itself (the symbol inhabits no type), but is merely associated with it. For example, if a has the associated type nat, then get[a] will be a command returning a number, and set[a](e) will take a number, e, as argument. Similarly for channels, and other uses of symbols as indices of other operators.

Given a symbol a with associated type T, one may form a reference to a, written &a, as a value whose type, in the case of a reference to an assignable, will be, say, T assignable reference, or similar terminology. This type is interpreted by elimination forms that take a value as argument, and transition to the corresponding operator for that assignable: getref(&a) transitions to get[a], and setref(&a;e) transitions to set[a](e). Similar rules govern other uses of symbols. The “ref” operations simply dereference the symbol (determine which assignable it references, in the case of assignables), and defer to the underlying interpretation of the referenced symbol. In the case of process calculi channel passing is effected using references to channels, and there are operations that determine an event based on the referent of a value of channel reference type. (This greatly clarifies, in my view, some aspects of the π-calculus, and leads to a well-behaved theory of process equivalence.)

The scoping of symbols, or names, is handled independently of their interpretation. One may use either a scoped or a scope-free interpretation of symbols. Scoped symbols have a limited extent; free symbols have unlimited extent. The concept of a mobile type, adapted from our work on ML5, manages the interaction between scoped declarations and evaluation (for which see the book). One consequence is that one may form references to both scoped and unscoped assignables, independently of the scope discipline. In other words I am deliberately breaking the conventional linkage between the extent of an assignable and the formation of a reference to it. Usually people conflate reference with state and with global extent; I am deliberately not following that convention, because I think it muddles things up. So, for example, in my account of Algol I have no difficulty in allowing references to scoped assignables, and passing them as arguments to procedures. I found this surprising, at first, but then quite natural once I had analyzed the situation more carefully.

Finally, let me mention that the critical property of assignables (in fact, symbols in general) is that they admit disequality. Two different assignables, say a and b, can never, under any execution scenario, be aliases for one another: an assignment to one will never affect the content of the other. Aliasing is a property of references, because two references, say bound to variables x and y, may refer to the same underlying assignable, but two different assignables can never be aliases for one another.  Assignables and variables are different things, and references are yet different from those.

Update: word smithing, tightening.

## Words Matter

February 1, 2012

Yesterday, during a very nice presentation by Ohad Kammar at Carnegie Mellon, the discussion got derailed, in part, because of a standard, and completely needless, terminological confusion involving the word “variable”.  I’m foolish enough to try to correct it.

The problem is that we’ve all been taught to confuse variables with variables—that is, program variables with mathematical variables.  The distinction is basic.  Since time immemorial (well, at least since al Khwarizmi) we have had the notion of a variable, properly so-called, which is given meaning by substitution.  A variable is an unknown, or indeterminate, quantity that can be replaced by any value of its type (a type being, at least since Russell, the range of significance of a variable).  Frege gave the first systematic study of the quantifiers, and Church exploited the crucial concept of a variable to give the most sharply original and broadly applicable model of computation, the $\lambda$-calculus.

Since the dawn of Fortran something that is not a variable has come to be called a variable.  A program variable, in the sense of Fortran and every imperative language since, is not given meaning by substitution.  Rather, it is given meaning by (at least) two operations associated with it, one to get its contents and one to put new contents into it.  (And, maybe, an operation to form a reference to it, as in C or even Algol.)  Now as many of you know, I think that the concept of a program variable in this sense is by and large a bad idea, or at any rate not nearly as important as it has been made out to be in conventional (including object-oriented) languages, but that’s an argument for another occasion.

Instead, I’m making a plea.  Let’s continue to call variables variables.  It’s a perfectly good name, and refers to what is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the human mind, the fundamental concept of algebra, the variable.  But let’s stop calling those other things variables!  In my Practical Foundations for Programming Languages I coined (as far as I know) a word that seems perfectly serviceable, namely an assignable.  The things called variables in imperative languages should, rather, be called assignables.  The word is only a tad longer than variable, and rolls off the tongue just as easily, and has the advantage of being an accurate description of what it really is.  What’s not to like?

Why bother?  For one thing, some languages have both concepts, a necessity if you want your language to be mathematically civilized (and you do).  For another, in the increasingly important world of program verification, the specification formalisms, being mathematical in nature, make use of variables, which most definitely are not assignables!  But the real reason to make the distinction is, after all, because words matter.  Two different things deserve to have two different names, and it only confuses matters to use the same word for both.  This week’s confusion was only one example of many that I have seen over the years.

So, my suggestion: let’s call variables variables, and let’s call those other things assignables.  In the fullnesss of time (i.e., once the scourge of imperative programming has been lifted) we may not need the distinction any longer.  But until then, why not draw the distinction properly?

Update: remove forward reference.

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