Plotkin has advocated the combination of linear lambda calculus, polymorphism and fixed point recursion as an expressive semantic metalanguage. We study its expressive power from an operational point of view. We show that the naturally call-by-value operators of linear lambda calculus can be given a call-by-name semantics without affecting termination at exponential types and hence without affecting ground contextual equivalence. This result is used to prove properties of a logical relation that provides a new extensional characterisation of ground contextual equivalence and relational parametricity properties of polymorphic types.

. Existential types have proved useful for classifying various kinds of information hiding in programming languages, such as occurs in abstract datatypes and objects. In this paper we address the question of when two elements of an existential type are semantically equivalent. Of course, it depends what one means by `semantic equivalence'. Here we take a syntactic approach---so semantic equivalence will mean some kind of operational equivalence. The paper begins by surveying some of the literature on this topic involving `logical relations'. Matters become quite complicated if the programming language mixes existential types with function types and features involving non-termination (such as recursive definitions). We give an example (suggested by Ian Stark) to show that in this case the existence of suitable relations is sufficient, but not necessary for proving operational equivalences at existential types. Properties of this and other examples are proved using a new form of operatio...

Abstract. Normal form bisimulation is a powerful theory of program equivalence, originally developed to characterize Lévy-Longo tree equivalence and Boehm tree equivalence. It has been adapted to a range of untyped, higher-order calculi, but types have presented a difficulty. In this paper, we present an account of normal form bisimulation for types, including recursive types. We develop our theory for a continuation-passing style calculus, Jump-With-Argument (JWA), where normal form bisimilarity takes a very simple form. We give a novel congruence proof, based on insights from game semantics. A notable feature is the seamless treatment of eta-expansion. We demonstrate the normal form bisimulation proof principle by using it to establish a syntactic minimal invariance result and the uniqueness of the fixed point operator at each type.

We develop an operational theory of higher-order functions, recursion, and fair non-determinism for a non-trivial, higher-order, call-by-name functional programming language extended with McCarthy's amb. Implemented via fair parallel evaluation, functional programming with amb is very expressive. However, conventional semantic fixed point principles for reasoning about recursion fail in the presence of fairness. Instead, we adapt higher-order operational methods to deal with fair non-determinism. We present two natural semantics, describing mayand must-convergence, and define a notion of contextual equivalence over these two modalities. The presence of amb raises special difficulties when reasoning about contextual equivalence. In particular, we report on a challenging open problem with regard to the validity of bisimulation proof methods. We develop two sound and useful reasoning methods which, in combination, enable us to prove a rich collection of laws for contextual...

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We present a novel technique for offine partial evaluation of functional languages with an ML-style typing discipline. Our program specialization method comprises a polymorphic binding-time analysis with polymorphic recursion. Based on the region calculus of Tofte and Talpin, we develop a binding-time analysis as a constraint analysis on top of region inference. Our insight is to regard binding times as properties of regions.

A formal and automatic verification of a real-life protocol is presented. The protocol, about 2800 lines of assembler code, has been used in products from the audio/video company Bang & Olufsen throughout more than a decade, and its purpose is to control the transmission of messages between audio/video components over a single bus. Such communications may collide, and one essential purpose of the protocol is to detect such collisions. The functioning is highly dependent on real-time considerations. Though the protocol was known to be faulty in that messages were lost occasionally, the protocol was too complicated in order for Bang & Olufsen to locate the bug using normal testing. However, using the real-time verification tool UPPAAL, an error trace was automatically generated, which caused the detection of "the error" in the implementation. The error was corrected and the correction was automatically proven correct, again using UPPAAL. A future, and more automated, version of the protocol, where this error is fatal, will incorporate the correction. Hence, this work is an elegant demonstration of how model checking has had an impact on practical software development. The effort of modeling this protocol has in addition generated a number of suggestions for enriching the UPPAAL language. Hence, it's also an excellent example of the reverse impact.

Abstract. A region calculus is a programming language calculus with explicit instrumentation for memory management. Every value is annotated with a region in which it is stored and regions are allocated and deallocated in a stack-like fashion. The annotations can be statically inferred by a type and effect system, making a region calculus suitable as an intermediate language for a compiler of statically typed programming languages. Although a lot of attention has been paid to type soundness properties of different flavors of region calculi, it seems that little effort has been made to develop a semantic framework. In this paper, we present a theory based on bisimulation, which serves as a coinductive proof principle for showing equivalences of polymorphically region-annotated terms. Our notion of bisimilarity is reminiscent of open bisimilarity for the π-calculus and we prove it sound and complete with respect to Morris-style contextual equivalence. As an application, we formulate a syntactic equational theory, which is used elsewhere to prove the soundness of a specializer based on region inference. We use our bisimulation framework to show that the equational theory is sound with respect to contextual equivalence.

Abstract. This paper studies inductive definitions involving binders, in which aliasing between free and bound names is permitted. Such aliasing occurs in informal specifications of operational semantics, but is excluded by the common representation of binding as meta-level λ-abstraction. Drawing upon ideas from functional logic programming, we represent such definitions with aliasing as recursively defined functions in a higher-order typed functional programming language that extends core ML with types for name-binding, a type of “semi-decidable propositions” and existential quantification for types with decidable equality. We show that the representation is sound and complete with respect to the language’s operational semantics, which combines the use of evaluation contexts with constraint programming. We also give a new and simple proof that the associated constraint problem is NP-complete. 1

We propose a theory of up-to techniques for proofs by coinduction, in the setting of complete lattices. This theory improves over existing results by providing a way to compose arbitrarily complex techniques with standard techniques, expressed using a very simple and modular semi-commutation property. Complete lattices are enriched with monoid operations, so that we can recover standard results about labelled transitions systems and their associated behavioural equivalences at an abstract, “point-free ” level. Our theory gives for free a powerful method for validating up-to techniques. We use it to revisit up to contexts techniques, which are known to be difficult in the weak case: we show that it is sufficient to check basic conditions about each operator of the language, and then rely on an iteration technique to deduce general results for all contexts.