In this paper we describe the promoted tyft/tyxt rule format for defining higher-order languages. The rule format is a generalization of Groote and Vaandrager 's tyft/tyxt format in which terms are allowed as labels on transitions in rules. We prove that bisimulation is a congruence for any language defined in promoted tyft/tyxt format and demonstrate the usefulness of the rule format by presenting promoted tyft/tyxt definitions for the lazy -calculus, CHOCS and the ß-calculus. 1 Introduction For a programming language definition that uses bisimulation as the notion of equivalence, it is desirable for the bisimulation relation to be compatible with the language constructs; i.e. that bisimulation be a congruence. Several rule formats have been defined, so that as long as a definition satisfies certain syntactic constraints, then the defined bisimulation relation is guaranteed to be a congruence. However these rule formats have not been widely used for defining languages with higher-...

In this paper we present history-dependent automata (HD-automata in brief). They are an extension of ordinary automata that overcomes their limitations in dealing with history-dependent formalisms. In a history-dependent formalism the actions that a system can perform carry information generated in the past history of the system. The most interesting example is -calculus: channel names can be created by some actions and they can then be referenced by successive actions. Other examples are CCS with localities and the history-preserving semantics of Petri nets. Ordinary