The question of the decidability of the observational ordering of finitary PCF was raised [5] to give mathematical content to the full abstraction problem for PCF [9, 14]. We show that the ordering is in fact undecidable. This result places limits on how explicit a representation of the fully abstract model can be. It also gives a slight strengthening of the author’s earlier result on typed λ-definability [6].

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.