Neil Ghani Dept. of Math. and Comp. Sci.

This paper shows that the approach of [2,12] for obtaining coinductive solutions of equations on infinite terms is a special case of a more general recent approach of [4] using distributive laws.

It is well known that, given an endofunctor H on a category C, the initial (A + H−)-algebras (if existing), i.e., the algebras of (wellfounded) H-terms over different variable supplies A, give rise to a monad with substitution as the extension operation (the free monad induced by the functor H). Moss [17] and Aczel, Adámek, Milius and Velebil [2] have shown that a similar monad, which even enjoys the additional special property of having iterations for all guarded substitution rules (complete iterativeness), arises from the inverses of the final (A + H−)-coalgebras (if existing), i.e., the algebras of non-wellfounded H-terms. We show that, upon an appropriate generalization of the notion of substitution, the same can more generally be said about the initial T ′ (A, −)-algebras resp. the inverses of the final T ′ (A, −)coalgebras for any endobifunctor T ′ on any category C such that the functors T ′ (−,X) uniformly carry a monad structure.

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in higherorder syntax which seeks to extend standard initial algebra semantics to cover languages with variable binding by using functor categories. The canonical example studied in the literature is that of the untyped λ-calculus which is handled as an instance of the general theory of binding algebras, cf. Fiore, Plotkin, Turi [8]. Another important syntactic construction is that of explicit substitutions. The syntax of a language with explicit substitutions does not form a binding algebra as an explicit substitution may bind an arbitrary number of variables. Nevertheless we show that the language given by a standard signature Σ and explicit substitutions is naturally modelled as the initial algebra of the endofunctor Id + FΣ ◦ + ◦ on a functor category. We also comment on the apparent lack of modularity in syntax with variable binding as compared to first-order languages. Categories and Subject Descriptors