Plotkin, in his seminal article Call-by-name, call-by-value and the λ-calculus, formalized evaluation strategies and simulations using operational semantics and continuations. In particular, he showed how call-by-name evaluation could be simulated under call-by-value evaluation and vice versa. Since Algol 60, however, call-by-name is both implemented and simulated with thunks rather than with continuations. We recast

We prove that the class of stable models is incomplete with respect to pure λ-calculus. More precisely, we show that no stable model has the same theory as the strongly stable version of Park's model. This incompleteness proof can be adapted to the continuous case, giving an incompleteness proof for this case which is much simpler than the original proof by Honsell an Ronchi della Rocca. Moreover, we isolate a very simple finite set, F , of equations and inequations, which has neither a stable nor a continuous model, and which is included in Th(P fs ) and in T

One of the most important contributions of A. Church to logic is his invention of the lambda calculus. We present the genesis of this theory and its two major areas of application: the representation of computations and the resulting functional programming languages on the one hand and the representation of reasoning and the resulting systems of computer mathematics on the other hand. Acknowledgement. The following persons provided help in various ways. Erik Barendsen, Jon Barwise, Johan van Benthem, Andreas Blass, Olivier Danvy, Wil Dekkers, Marko van Eekelen, Sol Feferman, Andrzej Filinski, Twan Laan, Jan Kuper, Pierre Lescanne, Hans Mooij, Robert Maron, Rinus Plasmeijer, Randy Pollack, Kristoffer Rose, Richard Shore, Rick Statman and Simon Thompson. Partial support came from the European HCM project Typed lambda calculus (CHRXCT-92-0046), the Esprit Working Group Types (21900) and the Dutch NWO project WINST (612-316-607). 1. Introduction This paper is written to honor Church's gr...

. The variety (equational class) of lambda abstraction algebras was introduced to algebraize the untyped lambda calculus in the same way Boolean algebras algebraize the classical propositional calculus. The equational theory of lambda abstraction algebras is intended as an alternative to combinatory logic in this regard since it is a first-order algebraic description of lambda calculus, which allows to keep the lambda notation and hence all the functional intuitions. In this paper we show that the lattice of the subvarieties of lambda abstraction algebras is isomorphic to the lattice of lambda theories of the lambda calculus; for every variety of lambda abstraction algebras there exists exactly one lambda theory whose term algebra generates the variety. For example, the variety generated by the term algebra of the minimal lambda theory is the variety of all lambda abstraction algebras. This result is applied to obtain a generalization of the genericity lemma of finitary lambda calculus...

Game semantics has renewed denotational semantics. It offers among other things an attractive classification of programming features, and has brought a bunch of new definability results. In parallel, in the denotational semantics of proof theory, several full completeness results have been shown since the early nineties. In this note, we review the relation between definability and full abstraction, and we put a few old and recent results of this kind in perspective.

We present a new category of games on graphs and derive from it a model for Intuitionistic Linear Logic. Our category has the computational flavour of concrete data structures but embeds fully and faithfully in an abstract games model. It differs markedly from the usual Intuitionistic Linear Logic setting for sequential algorithms. However, we show that with a natural exponential we obtain a model for PCF essentially equivalent to the sequential algorithms model. We briefly consider a more extensional setting and the prospects for a better understanding of the Longley Conjecture. 1

We construct a model for FPC, a purely functional, sequential, call-by-value language. The model is built from partial continuous functions, in the style of Plotkin, further constrained to be uniform with respect to a class of logical relations. We prove that the model is fully abstract.

Connections between the sequentiality/concurrency distinction and the semantics of proofs are investigated, with particular reference to games and Linear Logic.

In ML style pattern matching, pattern size is not constrained and ambiguous patterns are allowed. This generality leads to a clear and concise programming style but is challenging in the context of lazy evaluation. A first challenge concerns language designers: in lazy ML, the evaluation order of expressions follows actual data dependencies. That is, only the computations that are needed to produce the final result are performed. Once given a proper (that is, non-ambiguous) semantics, pattern matching should be compiled in a similar spirit: any value matching a given pattern should be recognized by performing only the minimal number of elementary tests needed to do so. This challenge was first met by A. Laville. A second challenge concerns compiler designers. As it stands, Laville's compilation algorithm cannot be incorporated in an actual lazy ML compiler for efficiency and completeness reasons. As a matter of fact, Laville's original algorithm did not fully treat the case of intege...

This paper studies confluence of extensional and non-extensional -calculi with explicit substitutions, where extensionality is interpreted by j-expansion. For that, we propose a scheme for explicit substitutions which describes those abstract properties that are sufficient to guarantee confluence. Our method makes it possible to treat at the same time many well-known calculi such as oe , oe * , OE , s , AE , f , d and dn . Keywords: functional programming, -calculi, explicit substitutions, confluence, extensionality. 1 Introduction The -calculus is a convenient framework to study functional programming, where the evaluation process is modeled by fi-reduction. The main mechanism used to perform fi-reduction is substitution, which consists of the replacement of formal parameters by actual arguments. The correctness of substitution is guaranteed by a systematic renaming of bound variables, inconvenient which can be simply avoided in the -calculus `a la de Bruijn by using natur...