Abstract

We discuss new ways of characterizing, as maximal fixed points of monotone operators, observational congruences on -terms and, more in general, equivalences on applicative structures. These characterizations naturally induce new forms of coinduction principles, for reasoning on program equivalences, which are not based on Abramsky's applicative bisimulation. We discuss in particular, what we call, the cartesian coinduction principle, which arises when we exploit the elementary observation that functional behaviours can be expressed as cartesian graphs. Using the paradigm of final semantics, the soundness of this principle over an applicative structure can be expressed easily by saying that the applicative structure can be construed as a strongly extensional coalgebra for the functor (P( \Theta )) \Phi (P( \Theta )). In this paper, we present two general methods for showing the soundenss of this principle. The first applies to approximable applicative structures. Many c.p.o. -models in...

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