Term Rewriting Systems play an important role in various areas, such as abstract data type specifications, implementations of functional programming languages and automated deduction. In this chapter we introduce several of the basic comcepts and facts for TRS's. Specifically, we discuss Abstract Reduction Systems

Least fixpoints as meanings of recursive definitions.

The theme of this paper is profunctors, and their centrality and ubiquity in understanding concurrent computation. Profunctors (a.k.a. distributors, or bimodules) are a generalisation of relations to categories. Here they are first presented and motivated via spans of event structures, and the semantics of nondeterministic dataflow. Profunctors are shown to play a key role in relating models for concurrency and to support an interpretation as higher-order processes (where input and output may be processes). Two recent directions of research are described. One is concerned with a language and computational interpretation for profunctors. This addresses the duality between input and output in profunctors. The other is to investigate general spans of event structures (the spans can be viewed as special profunctors) to give causal semantics to higher-order processes. For this it is useful to generalise event structures to allow events which “persist.”

Categorical combinators [12, 21, 43] and more recently oe-calculus [1, 23], have been introduced to provide an explicit treatment of substitutions in the -calculus. We reintroduce here the ingredients of these calculi in a self-contained and stepwise way, with a special emphasis on confluence properties. The main new results of the paper w.r.t. [12, 21, 1, 23] are the following: 1. We present a confluent weak calculus of substitutions, where no variable clashes can be feared. 2. We solve a conjecture raised in [1]: oe-calculus is not confluent (it is confluent on ground terms only). This unfortunate result is "repaired" by presenting a confluent version of oe-calculus, named the Env-calculus in [23], called here the confluent oe-calculus.

The aim of this paper is to present the s-calculus which is a very simple -calculus with explicit substitutions and to prove its confluence on closed terms and the preservation of strong normalisation of -terms. We shall prove strong normalisation of the corresponding calculus of substitution by translating it into the oe-calculus [ACCL91], and therefore the relation between both calculi will be made explicit. The confluence of the s-calculus is obtained by the "interpretation method" ([Har89], [CHL92]). The proof of the preservation of normalisation follows the lines of an analogous result for the AE-calculus (cf. [BBLRD95]). The relation between s and AE is also studied.

Abstract † We introduce a new paradigm for the integration of functional and logic programming. Unlike most current research, our approach is not based on extending unification to general-purpose equation solving. Rather, we propose a computation delaying mechanism called residuation. This allows a clear distinction between functional evaluation and logical deduction. The former is based on the λ-calculus, and the latter on Horn clause resolution. In clear contrast with equation-solving approaches, our model supports higher-order function evaluation and efficient compilation of both functional and logic programming expressions, without being plagued by non-deterministic term-rewriting. In addition, residuation lends itself naturally to process synchronization and constrained search. Besides unification (equations), other residuations may be any ground-decidable goal, such as mutual exclusion (inequations), and comparisons (inequalities). We describe an implementation of the residuation paradigm as a prototype language called Le Fun—Logic, equations, and Functions.

We introduce a new category of finite, fair games, and winning strategies, and use it to provide a semantics for the multiplicative fragment of Linear Logic (mll) in which formulae are interpreted as games, and proofs as winning strategies. This interpretation provides a categorical model of mll which satisfies the property that every (history-free, uniformly) winning strategy is the denotation of a unique cut-free proof net. Abramsky and Jagadeesan first proved a result of this kind and they refer to this property as full completeness. Our result differs from theirs in one important aspect: the mix-rule, which is not part of Girard's Linear Logic, is invalidated in our model. We achieve this sharper characterization by considering fair games. A finite, fair game is specified by the following data: ffl moves which Player can play, ffl moves which Opponent can play, and ffl a collection of finite sequences of maximal (or terminal) positions of the game which are deemed to be fair. N...

This thesis examines the use of denotational semantics to reason about control flow in sequential, basically functional languages. It extends recent work in game semantics, in which programs are interpreted as strategies for computation by interaction with an environment. Abramsky has suggested that an intensional hierarchy of computational features such as state, and their fully abstract models, can be captured as violations of the constraints on strategies in the basic functional model. Non-local control flow is shown to fit into this framework as the violation of strong and weak ‘bracketing ’ conditions, related to linear behaviour. The language µPCF (Parigot’s λµ with constants and recursion) is adopted as a simple basis for higher-type, sequential computation with access to the flow of control. A simple operational semantics for both call-by-name and call-by-value evaluation is described. It is shown that dropping the bracketing condition on games models of PCF yields fully abstract models of µPCF.

) Maria C. F. Ferreira 1 and Delia Kesner 2 and Laurence Puel 2 1 Dep. de Inform'atica, Fac. de Ciencias e Tecnologia, Univ. Nova de Lisboa, Quinta da Torre, 2825 Monte de Caparica, Portugal, cf@fct.unl.pt. 2 CNRS & Lab. de Rech. en Informatique, Bat 490, Univ. de Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay Cedex, France, fkesner,puelg@lri.fr. Abstract. We study preservation of fi-strong normalization by d and dn , two confluent -calculi with explicit substitutions defined in [10]; the particularity of these calculi is that both have a composition operator for substitutions. We develop an abstract simulation technique allowing to reduce preservation of fi-strong normalization of one calculus to that of another one, and apply said technique to reduce preservation of fi-strong normalization of d and dn to that of f , another calculus having no composition operator. Then, preservation of fi-strong normalization of f is shown using the same technique as in [2]. As a consequence, d and dn become the fir...

In this paper, we show the correspondence existing between normalization in calculi with explicit substitution and cut elimination in sequent calculus for Linear Logic, via Proof Nets. This correspondence allows us to prove that a typed version of the #x-calculus [30, 29] is strongly normalizing, as well as of all the calculi isomorphic to it such as # # [24], # s [19], # d [21], and # f [11]. In order to achieve this result, we introduce a new notion of reduction in Proof Nets: this extended reduction is still confluent and strongly normalizing, and is of interest of its own, as it correspond to more identifications of proofs in Linear Logic that differ by inessential details. These results show that calculi with explicit substitutions are really an intermediate formalism between lambda calculus and proof nets, and suggest a completely new way to look at the problems still open in the field of explicit substitutions.