A categorical foundation for structured reversible flowchart languages: Soundness and adequacy

Structured reversible flowchart languages is a class of imperative reversible programming languages allowing for a simple diagrammatic representation of control flow built from a limited set of control flow structures. This class includes the reversible programming language Janus (without recursion), as well as more recently developed reversible programming languages such as R-CORE and R-WHILE. In the present paper, we develop a categorical foundation for this class of languages based on inverse categories with joins. We generalize the notion of extensivity of restriction categories to one that may be accommodated by inverse categories, and use the resulting decisions to give a reversible representation of predicates and assertions. This leads to a categorical semantics for structured reversible flowcharts, which we show to be computationally sound and adequate, as well as equationally fully abstract with respect to the operational semantics under certain conditions

String Diagrams for λ\lambda-calculi and Functional Computation

This tutorial gives an advanced introduction to string diagrams and graph languages for higher-order computation. The subject matter develops in a principled way, starting from the two dimensional syntax of key categorical concepts such as functors, adjunctions, and strictification, and leading up to Cartesian Closed Categories, the core mathematical model of the lambda calculus and of functional programming languages. This methodology inverts the usual approach of proceeding from syntax to a categorical interpretation, by rationally reconstructing a syntax from the categorical model. The result is a graph syntax -- more precisely, a hierarchical hypergraph syntax -- which in many ways is shown to be an improvement over the conventional linear term syntax. The rest of the tutorial focuses on applications of interest to programming languages: operational semantics, general frameworks for type inference, and complex whole-program transformations such as closure conversion and automatic differentiation

Modularity and implementation of mathematical operational semantics

Structural operational semantics is a popular technique for specifying the meaning of programs by means of inductive clauses. One seeks syntactic restrictions on those clauses so that the resulting operational semantics is well-behaved. This approach is simple and concrete but it has some drawbacks. Turi pioneered a more abstract categorical treatment based upon the idea that operational semantics is essentially a distribution of syntax over behaviour. In this article we take Turi's approach in two new directions. Firstly, we show how to write operational semantics as modular components and how to combine such components to specify complete languages. Secondly, we show how the categorical nature of Turi's operational semantics makes it ideal for implementation in a functional programming language such as Haskell

CHAD for Expressive Total Languages

We show how to apply forward and reverse mode Combinatory Homomorphic Automatic Differentiation (CHAD) to total functional programming languages with expressive type systems featuring the combination of - tuple types; - sum types; - inductive types; - coinductive types; - function types. We achieve this by analysing the categorical semantics of such types in $\Sigma$-types (Grothendieck constructions) of suitable categories. Using a novel categorical logical relations technique for such expressive type systems, we give a correctness proof of CHAD in this setting by showing that it computes the usual mathematical derivative of the function that the original program implements. The result is a principled, purely functional and provably correct method for performing forward and reverse mode automatic differentiation (AD) on total functional programming languages with expressive type systems.Comment: Under review at MSC