New tools are presented for reasoning about properties of recursively defined domains. We work within a general, category-theoretic framework for various notions of `relation' on domains and for actions of domain constructors on relations. Freyd's analysis of recursive types in terms of a property of mixed initiality/finality is transferred to a corresponding property of invariant relations. The existence of invariant relations is proved under completeness assumptions about the notion of relation. We show how this leads to simpler proofs of the computational adequacy of denotational semantics for functional programming languages with user-declared datatypes. We show how the initiality/finality property of invariant relations can be specialized to yield an induction principle for admissible subsets of recursively defined domains, generalizing the principle of structural induction for inductively defined sets. We also show how the initiality /finality property gives rise to the co-induct...

This paper describes a mixed induction/co-induction property of relations on recursively defined domains. We work within a general framework for relations on domains and for actions of type constructors on relations introduced by O'Hearn and Tennent [20], and draw upon Freyd's analysis [7] of recursive types in terms of a simultaneous initiality/finality property. The utility of the mixed induction/co-induction property is demonstrated by deriving a number of families of proof principles from it. One instance of the relational framework yields a family of induction principles for admissible subsets of general recursively defined domains which extends the principle of structural induction for inductively defined sets. Another instance of the framework yields the co-induction principle studied by the author in [22], by which equalities between elements of recursively defined domains may be proved via `bisimulations'. 1 Introduction A characteristic feature of higher-order functional lan...