The environment

We may think of an environment as a hypothesis in a proposition: ``Given a certain environment, evaluate an expression.'' In sequents, hypotheses appear to the left of the turnstyle. Since the result of the evaluation of a premise may alter the environment, we return the modified environment as well as the result of the evaluation. Here is the modified Exp judgement:

ENV Exp : INTEGER, ENV

Note that since we have changed the judgement, we must modify the syntax of all previously defined rules, adding the initial and final environments.

The phylum ENV stands for the environment. Our environment is a list of pairs of the form variable,value. Since the environment is manipulated by a Typol program, it should be implemented as an abstract syntax tree. We may either implement the environment tree in a distinct formalism specification, dedicated to this task, or augment the Exp language to add operators for the environment. For the sake of simplicity, we prefer to modify the Exp abstract syntax as follows:


   env -> PAIR * ... ;
   pair -> VAR INTEGER ;
 
   ENV  ::= env ;
   PAIR ::= pair ;

We do not add concrete syntax rules for these operators since we don't intend to parse the environment. Where do environment trees come from?

Please add the above lines to contrib/Exp/syntax/Exp.metal, recompile it, regenerate the parser, then reset the syntax from the main Centaur menu.


                  



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