The exponential modality of linear logic associates to every formula A a commutative comonoid !A which can be duplicated in the course of reasoning. Here, we explain how to compute the free commutative comonoid !A as a sequential limit of equalizers in any symmetric monoidal category where this sequential limit exists and commutes with the tensor product. We apply this general recipe to a series of models of linear logic, typically based on coherence spaces, Conway games and finiteness spaces. This algebraic description unifies for the first time a number of apparently different constructions of the exponential modality in spaces and games. It also sheds light on the duplication policy of linear logic, and its interaction with classical duality and double negation completion.

We show that a set of finite graphs of tree-width at most k is recognizable (with respect to the algebra of graphs with an unbounded number of sources) if and only if it is recognizable with respect to the algebra of graphs of tree-width at most k with at most k sources.

It is shown that the category of fuzzy relations with values in a ∗-autonomous poset gives a ∗-autonomous category. It is also shown that this construction can be generalized by replacing the ∗-autonomous poset by a ∗-autonomous category. In both cases, cofree coalgebras exist so that there is a natural! operation.

In a PCF-like call-by-name typed λ-calculus with a minimal fixpoint operator, ‘parallelor’, Plotkin's ‘continuous existential quantifier’ ∃ and recursive types together with constructors and destructors, all computable objects can be denoted by terms of the programming language. According to A. Meyer's terminology (cf. Meyer (1988)), such a programming language is called universal in the sense that any extension of it must be conservative, as all computable objects can already be expressed by program terms.

As a byproduct, we get that, in principle, recursive types could be totally avoided, as they appear as syntactically expressible retracts of the non-recursive type → , where and are the flat domains of natural numbers and boolean values, respectively.

Category theory offers a unified mathematical framework for the study of specifications and programs in a variety of styles, such as procedural, functional and concurrent. One way that these different languages may be treated uniformly is by generalising the definitions of some standard categorical concepts. In this paper we reproduce in the generalised theory analogues of some standard theorems on isomorphism, and outline their applications to programming languages.

The concept of abstract data types (ADTs) has emerged in the last fifteen years or so as one of the major programming design tools, with the emphasis on modular construction of large-scale programe. ADTs provide the means for seperating how data objects may be used from the different ways in which they actually are, or might be, implemented. A foundation for the theory of compputation with ADTs must provide answers to such questions as: What are ADTs and how may they be specified? What does it mean to implement an ADT? How may we construct new ADTs from old ones? What does it mean to compute with ADTs? This paper is devoted to a new and rather general, constructively based approach to these questions.

We prove the decidability of the logic T→ of Ticket Entailment. This issue was first raised by Anderson and Belnap within the framework of relevance logic, and is equivalent to the question of the decidability of type inhabitation in simply typed combinatory logic with the partial basis BB′IW. We solve the equivalent problem of type inhabitation for the restriction of simply typed lambda calculus to hereditarily right-maximal terms.

We continue our study of the negation-free structure of multiplicative linear logic, as represented by the structure of weakly distributive categories, to consider the ‘exponentials’! and ? in the weakly distributive context. In addition to the usual triple and cotriple structure that one would expect on each of the two operators, there must be some connection between them to replace the de Morgan relationship found in the linear logic context. This turns out to be the notion of tensorial strength. We analyze coherence for this situation, using a modification of the usual nets due to Danos, which is a form suitable for linear logic with exponentials but without negation.

This paper provides an abstract definition of a class of logics, called diagrammatic logics, together with a definition of morphisms and 2-morphisms between them. The definition of the 2-category of diagrammatic logics relies on category theory, mainly on adjunction, categories of fractions and limit sketches. This framework is applied to the formalisation of a parameterisation process. This process, which consists of adding a formal parameter to some operations in a given specification, is presented as a morphism of logics. Then the parameter passing process for recovering a model of the given specification from a model of the parameterised specification and an actual parameter is shown to be a 2-morphism of logics.

In this paper we study subtyping for inductive types in dependent type theories in the framework of coercive subtyping. General structural subtyping rules for parameterised inductive types are formulated based on the notion of inductive schemata. Certain extensional equality rules play an important role in proving some of the crucial properties of the type system with these subtyping rules. In particular, it is shown that the structural subtyping rules are coherent and that transitivity is admissible in the presence of the functorial rules of computational equality.

A generalised framework of site graphs is introduced in order to provide the first fully semantic definition of the side-effect-free core of the rule-based language Kappa. This formalisation allows the use of types either to confirm that a rule respects a certain invariant or to guide a restricted refinement process that allows us to constrain its run-time applicability.

Just like any other branch of mathematics, denotational semantics of programming languages should be formalised in type theory, but adapting traditional domain theoretic semantics, as originally formulated in classical set theory to type theory has proven challenging. This paper is part of a project on formulating denotational semantics in type theories with guarded recursion. This should have the benefit of not only giving simpler semantics and proofs of properties such as adequacy, but also hopefully in the future to scale to languages with advanced features, such as general references, outside the reach of traditional domain theoretic techniques.

Working in Guarded Dependent Type Theory (GDTT), we develop denotational semantics for Fixed Point Calculus (FPC), the simply typed lambda calculus extended with recursive types, modelling the recursive types of FPC using the guarded recursive types of GDTT. We prove soundness and computational adequacy of the model in GDTT using a logical relation between syntax and semantics constructed also using guarded recursive types. The denotational semantics is intensional in the sense that it counts the number of unfold-fold reductions needed to compute the value of a term, but we construct a relation relating the denotations of extensionally equal terms, i.e., pairs of terms that compute the same value in a different number of steps. Finally, we show how the denotational semantics of terms can be executed inside type theory and prove that executing the denotation of a boolean term computes the same value as the operational semantics of FPC.

This paper presents a filter model for π-calculus and shows its full abstraction with respect to a ‘may’ operational semantics. The model is introduced in the form of a type assignment system. Types are related by a preorder that mimics the operational behaviour of terms. A subject expansion theorem holds. Terms are interpreted as filters of types: this interpretation is compositional. The proof of full abstraction relies on a notion of realizability of types and on the construction of terms, which test when an arbitrary term has a fixed type.

Nominal sets are a sets-based first-order denotation for variables in logic and programming. In this paper we extend nominal sets to two-level nominal sets. These preserve much of the behaviour of nominal sets, including notions of variable and abstraction, but they include a denotation for both variables and meta-variables. Meta-variables are interpreted as infinite lists of distinct variable symbols. We use two-level sets to define, amongst other things, a denotation for meta-variable abstraction, and nominal style datatypes of syntax-with-binding with meta-variables. We discuss the connections between this and nominal terms and prove a soundness result.

Action-labelled transition systems (LTSs) have proved to be a fundamental model for describing and proving properties of concurrent systems. In this paper we introduce Multiple-Labelled Transition Systems (MLTSs) as generalisations of LTSs that enable us to deal with system features that are becoming increasingly important when considering languages and models for network-aware programming. MLTSs enable us to describe not only the actions that systems can perform but also their usage of resources and their handling (creation, revelation . . .) of names; these are essential for modelling changing evaluation environments. We also introduce MoMo, which is a logic inspired by Hennessy–Milner Logic and the μ-calculus, that enables us to consider state properties in a distributed environment and the impact of actions and movements over the different sites. MoMo operators are interpreted over MLTSs and both MLTSs and MoMo are used to provide a semantic framework to describe two basic calculi for mobile computing, namely μKlaim and the asynchronous π-calculus.

We establish sufficient and necessary conditions for a natural sink to be a colimit in DCPO. Based on these conditions, we show how to construct a colimit for any functor F from a small category Ω into the category DCPO. This demonstrates that the category DCPO is cocomplete. We also investigate under what conditions the colimit object is algebraic.

In this paper, aimed at dependently typed programmers, we present a novel connection between automated and interactive theorem proving paradigms. The novelty is that the connection offers a better trade-off between usability, efficiency and soundness when compared to existing techniques. This technique allows for a powerful interactive proof framework that facilitates efficient verification of finite domain theorems and guided construction of the proof of infinite domain theorems. Such situations typically occur with industrial verification. As a case study, an embedding of SAT and CTL model checking is presented, both of which have been implemented for the dependently typed proof assistant Agda.

Finally, an example of a real world railway control system is presented, and shown using our proof framework to be safe with respect to an abstract model of trains not colliding or derailing. We demonstrate how to formulate safety directly and show using interactive theorem proving that signalling principles imply safety. Therefore, a proof by an automated theorem prover that the signalling principles hold for a concrete system implies the overall safety. Therefore, instead of the need for domain experts to validate that the signalling principles imply safety they only need to make sure that the safety is formulated correctly. Therefore, some of the validation is replaced by verification using interactive theorem proving.

Timed and register automata are well-known models of computation over timed and data words, respectively. The former has clocks that allow to test the lapse of time between two events, whilst the latter includes registers that can store data values for later comparison. Although these two models behave differently in appearance, several decision problems have the same (un)decidability and complexity results for both models. As a prominent example, emptiness is decidable for alternating automata with one clock or register, both with non-primitive recursive complexity. This is not by chance.

This work confirms that there is indeed a tight relationship between the two models. We show that a run of a timed automaton can be simulated by a register automaton over ordered data domain, and conversely that a run of a register automaton can be simulated by a timed automaton. These are exponential time reductions hold both in the finite and infinite words settings. Our results allow to transfer decidability results back and forth between these two kinds of models, as well complexity results modulo an exponential time reduction. We justify the usefulness of these reductions by obtaining new results on register automata.

In this paper we study approach structures on dcpo's. A dcpo (X, ≤) will be endowed with several other structures: the Scott topology; an approach structure generated by a collection of weightable quasi metrics on X; and a collection of weights corresponding to the quasi metrics. Understanding the interaction between these structures on X will eventually lead to some fixed-point theorems for the morphisms in the category of approach spaces, which are called contractions. Existing fixed-point theorems on both monotone and non-monotone maps are obtained as special cases.

Numerical computation is traditionally performed using floating-point arithmetic and truncated forms of infinite series, a methodology which allows for efficient computation at the cost of some accuracy. For most applications, these errors are entirely acceptable and the numerical results are considered trustworthy, but for some operations, we may want to have guarantees that the numerical results are correct, or explicit bounds on the errors. To obtain rigorous calculations, floating-point arithmetic is usually replaced by interval arithmetic and truncation errors are explicitly contained in the result. We may then ask the question of which mathematical operations can be implemented in a way in which the exact result can be approximated to arbitrary known accuracy by a numerical algorithm. This is the subject of computable analysis and forms a theoretical underpinning of rigorous numerical computation. The aim of this article is to provide a straightforward introduction to this subject that is powerful enough to answer questions arising in dynamic system theory.