PARAMETER PASSING IN NONDETERMINISTIC RECURSIVE PROGRAMS

Call by value and call by name have some subtleties when used in a nondeterministic programming language. A common formalism is used to establish the denotational semantics of recursive programs called by name and called by value. Ashcroft and Hennessy introduced the idea of differentiating between selecting arguments from a set of arguments at the point of invocation and selecting arguments during the run of the procedure. This distinction is shown to be independent of the evaluation according to value or name, giving rise to four possible parameter passing methods, all of which have a suitable least fixed point semantics. © 1979.