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.

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