On the Safety of Nöcker’s Strictness Analysis

This paper proves correctness of Nöcker’s method of strictness analysis, implemented for Clean, which is an effective way for strictness analysis in lazy functional languages based on their operational semantics. We improve upon the work of Clark, Hankin and Hunt, which addresses correctness of the abstract reduction rules. Our method also addresses the cycle detection rules, which are the main strength of Nöcker’s strictness analysis. We reformulate Nöcker’s strictness analysis algorithm in a higherorder lambda-calculus with case, constructors, letrec, and a nondeterministic choice operator ⊕ used as a union operator. Furthermore, the calculus is expressive enough to represent abstract constants like Top or Inf . The operational semantics is a small-step semantics and equality of expressions is defined by a contextual semantics that observes termination of expressions. The correctness of several reductions is proved using a context lemma and complete sets of forking and commuting diagrams. The proof is based mainly on an exact analysis of the lengths of normal order reductions. However, there remains a small gap: Currently, the proof for correctness of strictness analysis requires the conjecture that our behavioral preorder is contained in the contextual preorder. The proof is valid without referring to the conjecture, if no abstract constants are used in the analysis.