exists only as a weakly consistent message stream. In all these cases, the reference includes the full set of instructions, or a recipe, for how to access the data; in this sense, it serves the same purpose as an identifier or address in memory.

If we have a set of keys K and a set of data objects D, any well-defined (single-valued) function from K to D ? {null} defines a type of reference, where null is the image of a key not referring to anything meaningful.

An alternative representation

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