Referential transparency, definiteness and unfoldability
The work
| Authors | Harald Søndergaard; Peter Sestoft |
|---|---|
| Type | article |
| Year | 1990 |
| Also known as | sndergaard1990referential |
| Citekey | sondergaard1990referential |
Where it appeared
| Published in | Acta Informatica |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Springer |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 505--517 |
Identifiers
| DOI | 10.1007/bf00277387 |
|---|
Abstract
The term "referential transparency" is frequently used to indicate that a programming language has certain useful substitution properties. We observe, however, that the formal and informal definitions given in the literature are not equivalent and we investigate their relationships. To this end, we study the definitions in the context of a simple expression language and show that in the presence of non-determinism, the differences between the definitions are manifest. We propose a definition of "referential transparency", based on Quine's, as well as of the related notions: definiteness and unfoldability. We demonstrate that these notions are useful to characterize programming languages.
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How it got here
| How it got here | agent via bibtex |
|---|---|
| Added | 2026-08-05 00:00 UTC |
| Approved by | a person 2026-08-16 15:35 UTC |
Filed under
Cite it as
@article{sondergaard1990referential,
title = {Referential transparency, definiteness and unfoldability},
author = {Harald Søndergaard and Peter Sestoft},
year = {1990},
journal = {Acta Informatica},
volume = {27},
number = {6},
pages = {505--517},
publisher = {Springer},
doi = {10.1007/bf00277387},
}
This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/sondergaard1990referential/ and will keep
doing so. It used to be called sndergaard1990referential, and those addresses still resolve to this one.