YALE: Yet Another Lambda Evaluator Based on Interaction Nets

Interaction nets provide a graphical paradigm of computation based on net rewriting. They have proved most successful in understanding the dynamics of reduction in the (lambda)calculus, where the prime example is the implementation of optimal reduction for the (lambda)-calculus (Lampingʹs algorithm), given by Gonthier, Abadi and Levy. However, efficient implementations of optimal reduction have had to break away from the interaction net paradigm. In this paper we give a new efficient interaction net encoding of the (lambda)-calculus which is not optimal, but overcomes the inefficiencies caused by the bookkeeping operations in the implementations of optimal reduction. We believe that this implementation of the (lambda)-calculus could provide the basis for highly efficient implementations of functional languages.