Least fixpoints as meanings of recursive definitions.

We study Girard's Linear Logic from the point of view of giving a concrete computational interpretation of the logic, based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism. In the case of Intuitionistic Linear Logic, this leads to a refinement of the lambda calculus, giving finer control over order of evaluation and storage allocation, while maintaining the logical content of programs as proofs, and computation as cut-elimination.

Introduction The commonly accepted basis for functional programming is the -calculus; and it is folklore that the -calculus is the prototypical functional language in puri ed form. But what is the -calculus? The syntax is simple and classical; variables, abstraction and application in the pure calculus, with applied calculi obtained by adding constants. The further elaboration of the theory, covering conversion, reduction, theories and models, is laid out in Barendregt's already classical treatise [Bar84]. It is instructive to recall the following crux, which occurs rather early in that work (p. 39): Meaning of -terms: rst attempt The meaning of a -term is its normal form (if it exists). All terms without normal forms are identi ed. This proposal incorporates such a simple and natural interpretation of the -calculus as

The mathematical framework of Stone duality is used to synthesize a number of hitherto separate developments in Theoretical Computer Science: • Domain Theory, the mathematical theory of computation introduced by Scott as a foundation for denotational semantics. • The theory of concurrency and systems behaviour developed by Milner, Hennessy et al. based on operational semantics. • Logics of programs. Stone duality provides a junction between semantics (spaces of points = denotations of computational processes) and logics (lattices of properties of processes). Moreover, the underlying logic is geometric, which can be computationally interpreted as the logic of observable properties—i.e. properties which can be determined to hold of a process on the basis of a finite amount of information about its execution. These ideas lead to the following programme:

An intensional model for the programming language PCF is described, in which the types of PCF are interpreted by games, and the terms by certain "history-free" strategies. This model is shown to capture definability in PCF. More precisely, every compact strategy in the model is definable in a certain simple extension of PCF. We then introduce an intrinsic preorder on strategies, and show that it satisfies some remarkable properties, such that the intrinsic preorder on function types coincides with the pointwise preorder. We then obtain an order-extensional fully abstract model of PCF by quotienting the intensional model by the intrinsic preorder. This is the first syntax-independent description of the fully abstract model for PCF. (Hyland and Ong have obtained very similar results by a somewhat different route, independently and at the same time.) We then consider the effective version of our model, and prove a Universality Theorem: every element of the effective extensional model is definable in PCF. Equivalently, every recursive strategy is definable up to observational equivalence.

This paper formalises within first-order logic some common practices in computer science to do with representing and reasoning about syntactical structures involving named bound variables (as opposed to nameless terms, explicit substitutions, or higher order abstract syntax). It introduces Nominal Logic, a version of first-order many-sorted logic with equality containing primitives for renaming via name-swapping and for freshness of names, from which a notion of binding can be derived. Its axioms express...

ion for the Lazy -calculus Samson Abramsky Guy McCusker Department of Computing Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine 180 Queen's Gate London SW7 2BZ United Kingdom Abstract We define a category of games G, and its extensional quotient E . A model of the lazy -calculus, a type-free functional language based on evaluation to weak head normal form, is given in G, yielding an extensional model in E . This model is shown to be fully abstract with respect to applicative simulation. This is, so far as we know, the first purely semantic construction of a fully abstract model for a reflexively-typed sequential language. 1 Introduction Full Abstraction is a key concept in programming language semantics [9, 12, 23, 26]. The ingredients are as follows. We are given a language L, with an `observational preorder' - on terms in L such that P - Q means that every observable property of P is also satisfied by Q; and a denotational model MJ\DeltaK. The model M is then said to be f...

Let S be some type system. A typing in S for a typable term M is the collection of all of the information other than M which appears in the final judgement of a proof derivation showing that M is typable. For example, suppose there is a derivation in S ending with the judgement A M : # meaning that M has result type # when assuming the types of free variables are given by A. Then (A, #) is a typing for M .

this paper, we present a new formal embodiment of Girard's programme, with the following salient features. 1. Our formalisation is based on elementary Domain Theory rather than C --algebras. It exposes precisely what structure is required of the ambient category in order to carry out the interpretation. Furthermore, we show how the interpretation arises from the construction of a categorical model of Linear Logic; this provides the basis for a rational reconstruction which makes the structure of the interpretation much easier to understand. 2. The key definitions in our interpretation differ from Girard's. Most notably, we replace the "execution formula" by a least fixpoint, essentially a generalisation of Kahn's semantics for feedback in dataflow networks [Kah77, KM77]. This, coupled with the use of the other distinctive construct of Domain theory, the lifting monad, enables us to interpret the whole of Linear Logic, and to prove soundness in full generality. 3. Our general notion of interpretation has simple examples, providing a suitable basis for concrete implementations. In fact, we sketch a computational interpretation of the Geometry of Interaction in terms of dataflow networks. Recall that computation in dataflow networks is asynchronous, i.e. "no global time", and proceeds by purely local "firing rules" that manipulate tokens. The further structure of this paper is as follows. In Section 2, we review the syntax of Linear Logic, and present the basic, and quite simple intuitions underlying the interpretation. In Section 3, we use these ideas to construct models of Linear Logic. In Section 4 we define the Geometry of Interaction interpretations, and how that they arise from the model constructed previously in a natural fashion. In Section 5, we give a computati...

FreshML extends ML with elegant and practical constructs for declaring and manipulating syntactical data involving binding operations. User-declared FreshML datatypes involving binders are concrete, in the sense that values of these types can be deconstructed by matching against patterns naming bound variables explicitly. Such matching may have a computational effect in which bound names get swapped with freshly generated names. Previous work on FreshML used a complicated static type system inferring information about the `freshness' of names for expressions in order to tame such effects. The main contribution of this paper is to show (perhaps surprisingly) that a much simpler type system without freshness inference, coupled with name swapping and a conventional treatment of fresh name generation, suffices for FreshML's crucial correctness property---namely that values of datatypes involving binders are operationally equivalent if and only if they represent #-equivalent pieces of object-level syntax. This correctness result is established via a novel denotational semantics. FreshML without static freshness inference is no more impure than ML and our experiences programming in it show that it supports a programming style pleasingly close to informal practice when it comes to dealing with syntax modulo #-equivalence.