Abstract Machine for a Comonadic Dataflow Language

The formal semantics of higher-order functional dataflow language programs can be represented with the concepts of arrows and comonads from category theory. Both of these methods convey the meaning of programs, but not the operational behaviour of them. In order to understand the operational behaviour of dataflow programs we will derive an abstract machine from an interpreter that is equivalent to a comonadic denotational semantics of a higher-order call-by-name dataflow language. The resulting abstract machine is identical to the well known abstract machine by Krivine with the exception of an overloaded notion of the environment and two additional transition rules for evaluating constructs specific to the dataflow language. The main result of this thesis is that the operational behaviour of call-by-name dataflow language programs is identical to the operational behaviour of regular non-strict languages