Abstract
Janus is an imperative, sequential language for reversibility. While heavily studied in the reversibility literature, to the best of our knowledge, no small-step semantics for it exists. Hence, we propose a small-step semantics for Janus and we prove it equivalent to a big-step semantics from the literature, for programs that have no runtime errors and no divergence. Our main motivation is to enable a future extension of Janus with concurrency primitives, which is more easily defined on top of a small-step semantics. As additional feature, a small-step semantics allows one to more easily distinguish between failing and non-terminating computations.
The work has been partially supported by French ANR project DCore ANR-18-CE25-0007. The second author has also been partially supported by MSCA-PF project 101106046—ReGraDe-CS and by INdAM – GNCS 2023 project RISICO, code CUP_E53C22001930001. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions.
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Lami, P., Lanese, I., Stefani, JB. (2024). A Small-Step Semantics for Janus. In: Mogensen, T.Æ., Mikulski, Ł. (eds) Reversible Computation. RC 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14680. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62076-8_8
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