A perspective on the dependency core calculus

Paper in proceeding, 2018

This paper presents a simple but equally expressive variant on the terminating fragment of the Dependency Core Calculus (DCC) of Abadi et al. [2]. DCC is a concise and elegant calculus for tracking dependency. The calculus has applications in, among other areas, information fow control, slicing, and binding time analysis. However, in this paper we show that it is possible to replace a core technical device in DCC with an alternative, simpler, formulation. The calculus has a denotational semantics in the same domain as DCC, using which we prove that the two calculi are equivalent. As a proof of concept to show that our calculus provides a simple analysis of dependency we implement it in Haskell, obtaining a simpler implementation compared to previous work [4].