The Guarded Lambda-Calculus: Programming and Reasoning with Guarded Recursion for Coinductive Types

We present the guarded lambda-calculus, an extension of the simply typed lambda-calculus with guarded recursive and coinductive types. The use of guarded recursive types ensures the productivity of well-typed programs. Guarded recursive types may be transformed into coinductive types by a type-forme...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ranald Clouston, Aleš Bizjak, Hans Bugge Grathwohl, Lars Birkedal
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Logical Methods in Computer Science e.V. 2017-04-01
Series:Logical Methods in Computer Science
Subjects:
Online Access:https://lmcs.episciences.org/2019/pdf
Description
Summary:We present the guarded lambda-calculus, an extension of the simply typed lambda-calculus with guarded recursive and coinductive types. The use of guarded recursive types ensures the productivity of well-typed programs. Guarded recursive types may be transformed into coinductive types by a type-former inspired by modal logic and Atkey-McBride clock quantification, allowing the typing of acausal functions. We give a call-by-name operational semantics for the calculus, and define adequate denotational semantics in the topos of trees. The adequacy proof entails that the evaluation of a program always terminates. We introduce a program logic with L\"ob induction for reasoning about the contextual equivalence of programs. We demonstrate the expressiveness of the calculus by showing the definability of solutions to Rutten's behavioural differential equations.
ISSN:1860-5974