A Theory of Core Fudgets

The Fudgets system is a toolkit for developing graphical applications in the lazy functional programming language Haskell. In this paper we develop an operational semantics for a subset of this system, inspired by ideas from concurrency theory. A semantic theory based on bisimulation is defined and shown to be a congruence. We consider two applications of this theory: firstly, some equational rules useful for reasoning about Fudget programs are verified; secondly, we show how the operational semantics can be used to check the correctness of implementations of the Fudgets system.