Propositional logic with short-circuit evaluation: a non-commutative and a commutative variant
Short-circuit evaluation denotes the semantics of propositional connectives in which the second argument is evaluated only if the first argument does not suffice to determine the value of the expression. Short-circuit evaluation is widely used in programming, with sequential conjunction and disjunct...
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Main Authors | , , |
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Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
04.10.2018
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Short-circuit evaluation denotes the semantics of propositional connectives
in which the second argument is evaluated only if the first argument does not
suffice to determine the value of the expression. Short-circuit evaluation is
widely used in programming, with sequential conjunction and disjunction as
primitive connectives.
We study the question which logical laws axiomatize short-circuit evaluation
under the following assumptions: compound statements are evaluated from left to
right, each atom (propositional variable) evaluates to either true or false,
and atomic evaluations can cause a side effect. The answer to this question
depends on the kind of atomic side effects that can occur and leads to
different "short-circuit logics". The basic case is FSCL (free short-circuit
logic), which characterizes the setting in which each atomic evaluation can
cause a side effect. We recall some main results and then relate FSCL to MSCL
(memorizing short-circuit logic), where in the evaluation of a compound
statement, the first evaluation result of each atom is memorized. MSCL can be
seen as a sequential variant of propositional logic: atomic evaluations cannot
cause a side effect and the sequential connectives are not commutative. Then we
relate MSCL to SSCL (static short-circuit logic), the variant of propositional
logic that prescribes short-circuit evaluation with commutative sequential
connectives.
We present evaluation trees as an intuitive semantics for short-circuit
evaluation, and simple equational axiomatizations for the short-circuit logics
mentioned that use negation and the sequential connectives only. |
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DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.1810.02142 |