Semantics of the reFLe t Language

reFLe t is a new fun tional language, developed at Intel for use in hardware design and veri ation. It ontains features intended to fa ilitate the onstru tion, analysis, and manipulation of the language's own programs. It is also intended to be the exe utable subset of the term language of a theorem prover based on higher order logi . In this paper, we onsider ore reFLe t|a language that extends a polymorphi ally typed al ulus with a datatype for programs and with onstru ts for spli ing programs into programs and for de ning fun tions that inspe t and modify programs. We prove that the redu tion semanti s for this language is strongly normalizing and on uent. We also give a set-theoreti al denotational semanti s for the language and prove that the redu tion semanti s is sound with respe t to the denotational semanti s. These results provide the basis for developing the semanti s of reFLe t's extension of higher order logi and proving its soundness.