Somebody mentioned "failure of full abstraction" on HN a few months ago (actually they said something a bit different), which I tracked down to a late 90s paper

Somebody mentioned "failure of full abstraction" on HN a few months ago (actually they said something a bit different), which I tracked down to a late 90s paper by Martin Abadi. It refers to a situation where the object code is exploitable because it doesn't fully reflect the semantics of the source code. One use of jets, in the secure code setting, is to provide a core language that is so simple that it can obviously be compiled in a "fully abstract" way. That is my understanding, anyway. The notion of fully abstract compilation seems to be quite hot, and it comes originally from Abadi's paper: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-154.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-154.pdf