An operational semantics for Scheme

Abstract

In the informal description of Scheme, the order of evaluating the operands and the operator of each application is unspecified. This paper presents an operational semantics for Scheme which faithfully reflects this fact. Furthermore, when the semantics is restricted so as to assume there is one unspecified order used throughout a program, the semantics is shown to be sound with respect to the denotational semantics of Scheme.