A tension in language design has been between simple semantics on the one hand, and rich possibilities for side-effects, exception handling and so on on the other. The introduction of monads has made a large step towards reconciling these alternatives. First proposed by Moggi as a way of structuring semantic descriptions, they were adopted by Wadler to structure Haskell programs, and now offer a general technique for delimiting the scope of effects, thus reconciling referential transparency and imperative operations within one programming language. Monads have been used to solve long-standing problems such as adding pointers and assignment, inter-language working, and exception handling to Haskell, without compromising its purely functional semantics. The course will introduce monads, effects and related notions, and exemplify their applications in programming (Haskell) and in compilation (MLj). The course will present typed metalanguages for monads and related categorica...

A program derivation is said to be polytypic if some of its parameters are data types. Often these data types are container types, whose elements store data. Polytypic program derivations necessitate a general, non-inductive definition of `container (data) type'. Here we propose such a definition: a container type is a relator that has membership. It is shown how this definition implies various other properties that are shared by all container types. In particular, all container types have a unique strength, and all natural transformations between container types are strong. Capsule Review Progress in a scientific dicipline is readily equated with an increase in the volume of knowledge, but the true milestones are formed by the introduction of solid, precise and usable definitions. Here you will find the first generic (`polytypic') definition of the notion of `container type', a definition that is remarkably simple and suitable for formal generic proofs (as is amply illustrated in t...

We relate weak limit preservation properties of coalgebraic type functors F to structure theoretic properties of the class of all F-coalgebras.

Abstract. For any set-endofunctor T: Set → Set there exists a largest subcartesian transformation µ to the filter functor F: Set → Set. Thus we can associate with every T-coalgebra A a certain filter-coalgebra AF. Precisely, when T weakly preserves preimages, µ is natural, and when T weakly preserves intersections, µ factors through the covariant powerset functor P, thus providing for every T-coalgebra A a Kripke structure AP. The paper characterizes weak preservation of preimages, of intersections, and preservation of both preimages and intersections by a functor T via the existence of transformations from T to either F or P. Moreover, we define for arbitrary T-coalgebras A a next-time operator ○A with associated modal operators ✷ and ✸ and relate their properties to weak limit preservation properties of T. In particular, for any T-coalgebra A there is a transition system K with ○A = ○K if and only if T weakly preserves intersections. 1.

Abstract. We define an out-degree for F-coalgebras and show that the coalgebras of outdegree at most κ form a covariety. As a subcategory of all F-coalgebras, this class has a terminal object, which for many problems can stand in for the terminal F-coalgebra, which need not exist in general. As examples, we derive structure theoretic results about minimal coalgebras, showing that, for instance minimization of coalgebras is functorial, that products of finitely many minimal coalgebras exist and are given by their largest common subcoalgebra, that minimal subcoalgebras have no inner endomorphisms and show how minimal subcoalgebras can be constructed from Moore-automata. Since the elements of minimal subcoalgebras must correspond uniquely to the formulae of any logic characterizing observational equivalence, we give in the last section a straightforward and self-contained account of the coalgebraic logic of D. Pattinson and L. Schröder, which we believe is simpler and more direct than the original exposition. For every automaton A there exists a minimal automaton ∇(A), which displays

The incremental approach to modular monadic semantics constructs complex monads by using monad transformers to add computational features to a preexisting monad. A complication of this approach is that the operations associated to the pre-existing monad need to be lifted to the new monad. In a companion paper by Jaskelioff, the lifting problem has been addressed in the setting of system F ω. Here, we recast and extend those results in a category-theoretic setting. We abstract and generalize from monads to monoids (in a monoidal category), and from monad transformers to monoid transformers. The generalization brings more simplicity and clarity, and opens the way for lifting of operations with applicability beyond monads. Key words: Monad, Monoid, Monoidal Category