We study a general algebraic framework which underlies a wide range of computational formalisms...

Abstract. Exploiting linear type structure, we introduce a new theory of weak bisimilarity for the π-calculus in which we abstract away not only τ-actions but also non-τ actions which do not affect well-typed observers. This gives a congruence far larger than the standard bisimilarity while retaining semantic soundness. The framework is smoothly extendible to other settings involving nondeterminism and state. As an application we develop a behavioural theory of secrecy in the π-calculus which ensures secure information flow for a strictly greater set of processes than the type-based approach in [20, 23], while still offering compositional verification techniques. 1

Game semantics has renewed denotational semantics. It offers among other things an attractive classification of programming features, and has brought a bunch of new definability results. In parallel, in the denotational semantics of proof theory, several full completeness results have been shown since the early nineties. In this note, we review the relation between definability and full abstraction, and we put a few old and recent results of this kind in perspective.

Nobuko Yoshida Imperial College London ABSTRACT We introduce a new expressive theory of types for the higher-order p-calculus and demonstrate its applicability via non-trivial security analyses of a simple class-based language with distributed code mobility. The new theory significantly improves our previous one presented in [52] by the use of channel dependent/existential types. New dependent types control dynamic change of process accessibility via channel passing, while existential types guarantee safe scope-extrusion in higher-order process passing. This solves an open issue in [52], leading to significant enlargement of original typability. Two basic security concerns for mobile computation, secrecy for data confidentiality and access controls for authorised resources are analysed in a uniform type-based static framework, culminating in the noninterference theorem and authority-error freedom in the presence of higher-order code mobility. The generality and expressiveness of the new type discipline are tested with a sound embedding of multi-threaded class-based language with dynamic code/class distribution, enforcing secrecy and accessibility.

. Call-by-push-value is a new paradigm that subsumes the call-by-name and call-by-value paradigms, in the following sense: both operational and denotational semantics for those paradigms can be seen as arising, via translations that we will provide, from similar semantics for call-by-push-value. To explain call-by-push-value, we first discuss general operational ideas, especially the distinction between values and computations, using the principle that "a value is, a computation does". Using an example program, we see that the lambda-calculus primitives can be understood as push/pop commands for an operand-stack. We provide operational and denotational semantics for a range of computational effects and show their agreement. We hence obtain semantics for call-by-name and call-by-value, of which some are familiar, some are new and some were known but previously appeared mysterious. 1 Introduction 1.1 Contribution In his invited lecture at POPL '98 [32], Reynolds, surveying over 30 year...

Abstract. We describe a game semantics for local names in a functional setting. It is based on a category of dialogue games acted upon by the automorphism group of the natural numbers; this allows properties of names such as freshness and locality to be characterized semantically. We describe a model of the nu-calculus in this category, and extend it with named references (without bad variables) using names as pointers to a store. After refining the semantics via a notion of garbage collection, we prove that the compact elements are definable as terms, and hence obtain a full abstraction result. 1 Introduction Local names are a pervasive and subtle feature of programming languages and other calculi. Not only are they used for manipulating important constructs such as locally bound references and exceptions, name-passing is itself a very expressive computational paradigm, as demonstrated by the ss-calculus, for example. Local names can also represent items of secret information which are dynamically generated, passed between agents and used to access further information or activity. They therefore have a key r^ole in specifying properties of secure systems [1, 24].

) y Nobuko Yoshida ? Abstract. In [18, 19], we presented a theory of concurrent combinators for the asynchronous monadic ß-calculus without match or summation operator [7, 16]. The system of concurrent combinators is based on a finite number of atoms and fixed interaction rules, but is as expressive as the original calculus, so that it can represent diverse interaction structures, including polyadic synchronous name passing [23] and input guarded summations [26]. The present paper shows that each of the five basic combinators introduced in [18] is indispensable to represent the whole computation, i.e. if one of the combinators is missing, we can no longer express the original calculus up to weak bisimilarity. Expressive power of several interesting subsystems of the asynchronous ß-calculus is also measured by using appropriate subsets of the combinators and their variants. Finally as an application of the main result, we show there is no semantically sound encoding of the calculus in...

We construct a model for FPC, a purely functional, sequential, call-by-value language. The model is built from partial continuous functions, in the style of Plotkin, further constrained to be uniform with respect to a class of logical relations. We prove that the model is fully abstract.

Call-by-push-value is a ”semantic machine code”, providing a set of simple primitives from which both the call-by-value and call-by-name paradigms are built. We present its operational semantics as a stack machine, suggesting a term judgement of stacks. We then see that CBPV, incorporating these stack terms, has a simple categorical semantics based on an adjunction between values and stacks. There are no coherence requirements. We describe this semantics incrementally. First, we introduce locally indexed categories and the opGrothendieck construction, and use these to give the basic structure for interpreting the three judgements: values, stacks and computations. Then we look at the universal property required to interpret each type constructor. We define a model to be a strong adjunction with countable coproducts, countable products and exponentials. We see a wide range of instances of this structure: we give examples for divergence, storage, erratic choice, continuations, possible worlds and games (with or without a bracketing condition), in each case resolving the strong monad from the literature into a strong adjunction. And we give ways of constructing models from other models. Finally, we see that call-by-value and call-by-name are interpreted within the Kleisli and co-Kleisli parts, respectively, of a call-by-push-value adjunction.

ion for PCF Motivated by the full completeness results, it became of compelling interest to re-examine perhaps the best-known "open problem" in the semantics of programming languages, namely the "Full Abstraction problem for PCF", using the new tools provided by game semantics. 2 PCF is a higher-order functional programming language; modulo issues of the parameterpassing strategies, it forms a fragment of any programming language with higher-order procedures (which includes any reasonably expressive object-oriented language). The aspect of the Full Abstraction problem I personally found most interesting was: to construct a syntax-independent model in which every element is the denotation of some program (note the analogy with full completeness, whose definition had in turn been motivated in part by this aspect of full abstraction). This is not how the problem was originally formulated, but by "general abstract nonsense", given such a model one can always quotient it to get a fully ab...