Towards a Programming Language for Interaction Nets

Interaction nets were introduced almost 15 years ago. Since then they have been put forward as both a graphical programming paradigm and as an intermediate language into which we can compile other languages. Whichever way we use interaction nets, a problem remains in that the language is very primitive. Drawing an analogy with functional programming, we have the λ-calculus but we are missing the functional programming language: syntactic sugar, language constructs, data-structures, etc. The purpose of this paper is to make a first step towards defining such a programming language for interaction nets.