The development of programs in modern functional languages such as Haskell calls for a wide-spectrum specification formalism that supports the type system of such languages, in particular higher order types, type constructors, and parametric polymorphism, and contains a functional language as an executable subset in order to facilitate rapid prototyping. We lay out the design of HasCasl, a higher order extension of the algebraic specification language Casl that is geared towards precisely this purpose. Its semantics is tuned to allow program development by specification refinement, while at the same time staying close to the set-theoretic semantics of first order Casl. The number of primitive concepts in the logic has been kept as small as possible; we demonstrate how various extensions to the logic, in particular general recursion, can be formulated within the language itself.

this paper we describe a new, categorical approach to normalization in typed -

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From the analogue of Böhm’s Theorem proved for the typed lambda calculus, without product types and with them, it is inferred that every cartesian closed category that satisfies an equality between arrows not satisfied in free cartesian closed categories must be a preorder. A new proof is given here of these results, which were obtained previously by Richard Statman and Alex K. Simpson.

What equations can we guarantee that simple functional programs must satisfy, irrespective of their obvious defining equations? Equivalently, what non-trivial identifications must hold between lambda terms, thought-of as encoding appropriate natural deduction proofs ? We show that the usual syntax guarantees that certain naturality equations from category theory are necessarily provable. At the same time, our categorical approach addresses an equational meaning of cut-elimination and asymmetrical interpretations of cut-free proofs. This viewpoint is connected to Reynolds' relational interpretation of parametricity ([27], [2]), and to the Kelly-Lambek-Mac LaneMints approach to coherence problems in category theory. 1 Introduction In the past several years, there has been renewed interest and research into the interconnections of proof theory, typed lambda calculus (as a functional programming paradigm) and category theory. Some of these connections can be surprisingly subtle. Here we a...

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This paper establishes a new, limitative relation between the polymorphic lambda calculus and the kind of higher-order type theory which is embodied in the logic of toposes. It is shown that any embedding in a topos of the cartesian closed category of (closed) types of a model of the polymorphic lambda calculus must place the polymorphic types well away from the powertypes oe !\Omega of the topos, in the sense that oe !\Omega is a subtype of a polymorphic type only in the case that oe is empty (and hence oe !\Omega is terminal) . As corollaries, we obtain strengthenings of Reynolds' result on the non-existence of settheoretic models of polymorphism. Introduction The results reported in this paper have their origin in Reynolds' discovery that the standard set-theoretic model of the simply typed lambda calulus cannot be extended to model the polymorphic, or second-order, typed lambda calculus. In [9] Reynolds speculated that there might be a model of polymorphism in which the typ...

into two principal paradigms: model-theoretic syntax (MTS), which

Dedicated to the memory of Moez Alimohamed

This document provides an introduction to the interaction between category theory and mathematical logic which is slanted towards computer scientists.