Sieber has described a model of PCF consisting of continuous functions that are invariant under certain (finitary) logical relations, and shown that it is fully abstract for closed terms of up to third-order types. We show that one may achieve full abstraction at all types using a form of "Kripke logical relations" introduced by Jung and Tiuryn to characterize -definability. To appear in Information and Computation. (Accepted, October 1994) Supported by NSF grant CCR-92110829. 1 Introduction The nature of sequential functional computation has fascinated computer scientists ever since Scott remarked on a curious incompleteness phenomenon when he introduced LCF (Logic for Computable Functions) and its continuous function model in 1969 (Scott, 1993). Scott noted that although the functionals definable by terms in PCF---the term language of LCF---admitted a sequential evaluation strategy, there were functions in the model that seemed to require a parallel evaluation strategy. "Sequen...

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It is well known that adding side effects to functional languages changes the operational equivalences of the language. We develop a new language construct, encap, that forces imperative pieces of code to behave purely functionally, i.e., without any visible side effects. The coercion operator encap provides a means of extending the simple reasoning principles for equivalences of code in a functional language to a language with side effects. In earlier work [36], similar coercion operators were developed, but their correctness required the underlying functional language to include parallel operations. The coercion operators developed here are simpler and are proven correct for purely sequential languages. The sequential setting requires the construction of fully abstract models for sequential call-by-value languages and the formulation of a weak form of "monad" suitable for expressing the semantics of call-by-value languages with side effects. 1 Introduction Two pieces of code are...