Xavier Leroy. Coinductive Big-Step Operational Semantics. In Peter Sestoft, editor, Programming Languages and Systems, 15th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2006, Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2006, Vienna, Austria, March 27-28, 2006, Proceedings. Volume 3924 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 54-68, Springer, 2006. [doi]
This paper illustrates the use of coinductive definitions and proofs in big-step operational semantics, enabling the latter to describe diverging evaluations in addition to terminating evaluations. We show applications to proofs of type soundness and to proofs of semantic preservation for compilers.