The Language PCF

This chapter introduces a specific programming language called PCF (and sometimes mini-ML). This language is one of the backbones of the book. It will be evaluated, interpreted, compiled, and extended (with types, references, records and objects) in the rest of the book. This chapter focuses on giving an informal description of the language, defining its small-step and big-step operational semantics and culminates with the implementation of an evaluator for this language.