. A downwards accumulation is a higher-order operation that distributes information downwards through a data structure, from the root towards the leaves. The concept was originally introduced in an ad hoc way for just a couple of kinds of tree. We generalize the concept to an arbitrary regular datatype; the resulting denition is co-inductive. 1 Introduction The notion of scans or accumulations on lists is well known, and has proved very fruitful for expressing and calculating with programs involving lists [4]. Gibbons [7, 8] generalizes the notion of accumulation to various kinds of tree; that generalization too has proved fruitful, underlying the derivations of a number of tree algorithms, such as the parallel prex algorithm for prex sums [15, 8], Reingold and Tilford's algorithm for drawing trees tidily [21, 9], and algorithms for query evaluation in structured text [16, 23]. There are two varieties of accumulation on lists: leftwards and rightwards. Leftwards accumulation ...

Corecursive programs produce values of greatest fixpoint types, in contrast to recursive programs, which consume values of least fixpoint types. There are a number of widely used methods for proving properties of corecursive programs, including fixpoint induction, the take lemma, and coinduction. However, these methods are all rather low-level, in the sense that they do not exploit the common structure that is often present in corecursive definitions. We argue for a more structured approach to proving properties of corecursive programs. In particular, we show that by writing corecursive programs using an operator called unfold that encapsulates a common pattern of corecursive de nition, we can then use high-level algebraic properties of this operator to conduct proofs in a purely calculational style that avoids the use of either induction or coinduction.