[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] Formal semantics should not contain complicating optimizations

[AndrevanTonder]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2007, Robby Findler wrote:

> The formal semantics makes no claim to let you reason about the space
> behavior of your program!

But the body of the document does make some solid guarantees on space, 
and further allows one to infer behaviour w.r.t. copying and sharing of 
lambda parameters.  Shouldn't one of the the purposes of an operational 
(as opposed to denotational) semantics be precisely to formalize this kind of 
reasoning?  Insofar as it does not, I would consider it incorrect.

I have only seriously needed an operational semantics a few times, all of which 
involved reasoning about space behaviour.  An operational semantics that does 
the unnecessary copying of the current specification would have been no use to 
me in any of these cases.

Andre