  In this functional pearl, we examine the use of definitional interpreters as
a basis for abstract interpretation of higher-order programming languages. As
it turns out, definitional interpreters, especially those written in monadic
style, can provide a nice basis for a wide variety of collecting semantics,
abstract interpretations, symbolic executions, and their intermixings.
  But the real insight of this story is a replaying of an insight from
Reynold's landmark paper, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order
Programming Languages, in which he observes definitional interpreters enable
the defined-language to inherit properties of the defining-language. We show
the same holds true for definitional abstract interpreters. Remarkably, we
observe that abstract definitional interpreters can inherit the so-called
"pushdown control flow" property, wherein function calls and returns are
precisely matched in the abstract semantics, simply by virtue of the function
call mechanism of the defining-language.
  The first approaches to achieve this property for higher-order languages
appeared within the last ten years, and have since been the subject of many
papers. These approaches start from a state-machine semantics and uniformly
involve significant technical engineering to recover the precision of pushdown
control flow. In contrast, starting from a definitional interpreter, the
pushdown control flow property is inherent in the meta-language and requires no
further technical mechanism to achieve.
