. The dynamics of reactive systems, e.g. CCS, has often been de ned using a labelled transition system (LTS). More recently it has become natural in de ning dynamics to use reaction rules | i.e. unlabelled transition rules | together with a structural congruence. But LTSs lead more naturally to behavioural equivalences. So one would like to derive from reaction rules a suitable LTS. This paper shows how to derive an LTS for a wide range of reactive systems. A label for an agent a is de ned to be any context F which intuitively is just large enough so that the agent Fa (\a in context F ") is able to perform a reaction. The key contribution of this paper is a precise de nition of \just large enough", in terms of the categorical notion of relative pushout (RPO), which ensures that bisimilarity is a congruence when sucient RPOs exist. Two examples | a simpli ed form of action calculi and term-rewriting | are given, for which it is shown that su- cient RPOs indeed exist. The thrust of thi...

The field of quantum computation suffers from a lack of syntax. In the absence of a convenient programming language, algorithms are frequently expressed in terms of hardware circuits or Turing machines. Neither approach particularly encourages structured programming or abstractions such as data types. In this paper, we describe the syntax and semantics of a simple quantum programming language. This language provides high-level features such as loops, recursive procedures, and structured data types. It is statically typed, and it has an interesting denotational semantics in terms of complete partial orders of superoperators. 1

This document consists of a slightly revised and corrected version of a dissertation

We give an axiomatic treatment of fixed-point operators in categories. A notion of iteration operator is defined, embodying the equational properties of iteration theories. We prove a general completeness theorem for iteration operators, relying on a new, purely syntactic characterisation of the free iteration theory. We then show how iteration operators arise in axiomatic domain theory. One result derives them from the existence of sufficiently many bifree algebras (exploiting the universal property Freyd introduced in his notion of algebraic compactness) . Another result shows that, in the presence of a parameterized natural numbers object and an equational lifting monad, any uniform fixed-point operator is necessarily an iteration operator. 1. Introduction Fixed points play a central role in domain theory. Traditionally, one works with a category such as Cppo, the category of !-continuous functions between !-complete pointed partial orders. This possesses a least-fixed-point oper...

A framework is defined within which reactive systems can be studied formally. The framework is based upon s-categories, a new variety of categories, within which reactive systems can be set up in such a way that labelled transition systems can be uniformly extracted. These lead in turn to behavioural preorders and equivalences, such as the failures preorder (treated elsewhere) and bisimilarity, which are guaranteed to be congruential. The theory rests upon the notion of relative pushout previously introduced by the authors. The framework

. Milner introduced action calculi as a framework for investigating models of interactive behaviour. We present a type-theoretic account of action calculi using the propositions-as-types paradigm; the type theory has a sound and complete interpretation in Power's categorical models. We go on to give a sound translation of our type theory in the (type theory of) intuitionistic linear logic, corresponding to the relation between Benton's models of linear logic and models of action calculi. The conservativity of the syntactic translation is proved by a model-embedding construction using the Yoneda lemma. Finally, we briefly discuss how these techniques can also be used to give conservative translations between various extensions of action calculi. 1 Introduction Action calculi arose directly from the ß-calculus [MPW92]. They were introduced by Milner [Mil96], to provide a uniform notation for capturing many calculi of interaction such as the ß-calculus, the -calculus, models of distribut...

Abstract not found

To my parents Understanding procedure calls is crucial in computer science and everyday pro-gramming. Among the most common strategies for passing procedure argu-ments (‘evaluation strategies’) are ‘call-by-name’, ‘call-by-need’, and ‘call-by-value’, where the latter is the most commonly used. While reasoning about procedure calls is simple for call-by-name, problems arise for call-by-need and call-by-value, because it matters how often and in which order the arguments of a procedure are evaluated. We shall classify these problems and see that all of them occur for call-by-value, some occur for call-by-need, and none occur for call-by-name. In that sense, call-by-value is the ‘greatest common denominator ’ of the three evaluation strategies. Reasoning about call-by-value programs has been tackled by Eugenio Moggi’s ‘computational lambda-calculus’, which is based on a distinction between ‘values’

Abstract not found

. A general framework for typing graph rewriting systems is presented: the idea is to statically derive a type graph from a given graph. In contrast to the original graph, the type graph is invariant under reduction, but still contains meaningful behaviour information. We present conditions, a type system for graph rewriting should satisfy, and a methodology for proving these conditions. In two case studies it is shown how to incorporate existing type systems (for the polyadic - calculus and for a concurrent object-oriented calculus) into the general framework. 1 Introduction In the past, many formalisms for the specication of concurrent and distributed systems have emerged. Some of them are aimed at providing an encompassing theory: a very general framework in which to describe and reason about interconnected processes. Examples are action calculi [18], rewriting logic [16] and graph rewriting [3] (for a comparison see [4]). They all contain a method of building terms (or ...