Bistructures, Bidomains and Linear Logic

Bistructures are a generalisation of event structures which allow a representation of spaces of functions at higher types in an order-extensional setting. The partial order of causal dependency is replaced by two orders, one associated with input and the other with output in the behaviour of functions. Bistructures form a categorical model of Girard’s classical linear logic in which the involution of linear logic is modelled, roughly speaking, by a reversal of the roles of input and output. The comonad of the model has an associated co-Kleisli category which is closely related to that of Berry’s bidomains (both have equivalent non-trivial full sub-cartesian closed categories)

Preliminary draft

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On dialogue games and coherent strategies

We explain how to see the set of positions of a dialogue game as a coherence space in the sense of Girard or as a bistructure in the sense of Curien, Plotkin and Winskel. The coherence structure on the set of positions results from a Kripke translation of tensorial logic into linear logic extended with a necessity modality. The translation is done in such a way that every innocent strategy defines a clique or a configuration in the resulting space of positions. This leads us to study the notion of configuration designed by Curien, Plotkin and Winskel for general bistructures in the particular case of a bistructure associated to a dialogue game. We show that every such configuration may be seen as an interactive strategy equipped with a backward as well as a forward dynamics based on the interplay between the stable order and the extensional order. In that way, the category of bistructures is shown to include a full subcategory of games and coherent strategies of an interesting nature

On Linear Information Systems

Scott's information systems provide a categorically equivalent, intensional description of Scott domains and continuous functions. Following a well established pattern in denotational semantics, we define a linear version of information systems, providing a model of intuitionistic linear logic (a new-Seely category), with a "set-theoretic" interpretation of exponentials that recovers Scott continuous functions via the co-Kleisli construction. From a domain theoretic point of view, linear information systems are equivalent to prime algebraic Scott domains, which in turn generalize prime algebraic lattices, already known to provide a model of classical linear logic

On linear information systems

International audienc

Intensional and Extensional Semantics of Bounded and Unbounded Nondeterminism

We give extensional and intensional characterizations of nondeterministic functional programs: as structure preserving functions between biorders, and as nondeterministic sequential algorithms on ordered concrete data structures which compute them. A fundamental result establishes that the extensional and intensional representations of non-deterministic programs are equivalent, by showing how to construct a unique sequential algorithm which computes a given monotone and stable function, and describing the conditions on sequential algorithms which correspond to continuity with respect to each order. We illustrate by defining may and must-testing denotational semantics for a sequential functional language with bounded and unbounded choice operators. We prove that these are computationally adequate, despite the non-continuity of the must-testing semantics of unbounded nondeterminism. In the bounded case, we prove that our continuous models are fully abstract with respect to may and must-testing by identifying a simple universal type, which may also form the basis for models of the untyped lambda-calculus. In the unbounded case we observe that our model contains computable functions which are not denoted by terms, by identifying a further "weak continuity" property of the definable elements, and use this to establish that it is not fully abstract

Preface to Girard's Festschrift

International audienceThis text is both meant as a preface to a volume of Theoretical Computer Science dedicated to Jean-Yves Girard, and as a short essay in French (with an English summary) on the relation between proof theory and programming languages -- a coming together in which Jean-Yves' works play a prominent role

Preface to Girard's Festschrift

International audienceThis text is both meant as a preface to a volume of Theoretical Computer Science dedicated to Jean-Yves Girard, and as a short essay in French (with an English summary) on the relation between proof theory and programming languages -- a coming together in which Jean-Yves' works play a prominent role

On Berry's conjectures about the stable order in PCF

PCF is a sequential simply typed lambda calculus language. There is a unique order-extensional fully abstract cpo model of PCF, built up from equivalence classes of terms. In 1979, G\'erard Berry defined the stable order in this model and proved that the extensional and the stable order together form a bicpo. He made the following two conjectures: 1) "Extensional and stable order form not only a bicpo, but a bidomain." We refute this conjecture by showing that the stable order is not bounded complete, already for finitary PCF of second-order types. 2) "The stable order of the model has the syntactic order as its image: If a is less than b in the stable order of the model, for finite a and b, then there are normal form terms A and B with the semantics a, resp. b, such that A is less than B in the syntactic order." We give counter-examples to this conjecture, again in finitary PCF of second-order types, and also refute an improved conjecture: There seems to be no simple syntactic characterization of the stable order. But we show that Berry's conjecture is true for unary PCF. For the preliminaries, we explain the basic fully abstract semantics of PCF in the general setting of (not-necessarily complete) partial order models (f-models.) And we restrict the syntax to "game terms", with a graphical representation.Comment: submitted to LMCS, 39 pages, 23 pstricks/pst-tree figures, main changes for this version: 4.1: proof of game term theorem corrected, 7.: the improved chain conjecture is made precise, more references adde