Syntactic continuity from structural operational semantics

We illustrate how standard properties of recursive constructs in functional languages can be established directly from operational semantics, with very little mathematical overhead. The main property is a syntactic analogy of continuity which relates a recursive function to is finite unwindings. This property forms the basis of Scott-style fixed point induction. We present a rule format for deterministic structural operational semantics, and prove that any language which can be expressed in this rule format satisfies the syntactic continuity property.