Note on star-autonomous comonads

We develop an alternative approach to star-autonomous comonads via linearly distributive categories. It is shown that in the autonomous case the notions of star-autonomous comonad and Hopf comonad coincide.Comment: 9 page

When is a container a comonad?

Abbott, Altenkirch, Ghani and others have taught us that many parameterized datatypes (set functors) can be usefully analyzed via container representations in terms of a set of shapes and a set of positions in each shape. This paper builds on the observation that datatypes often carry additional structure that containers alone do not account for. We introduce directed containers to capture the common situation where every position in a data-structure determines another data-structure, informally, the sub-data-structure rooted by that position. Some natural examples are non-empty lists and node-labelled trees, and data-structures with a designated position (zippers). While containers denote set functors via a fully-faithful functor, directed containers interpret fully-faithfully into comonads. But more is true: every comonad whose underlying functor is a container is represented by a directed container. In fact, directed containers are the same as containers that are comonads. We also describe some constructions of directed containers. We have formalized our development in the dependently typed programming language Agda

A category of quantum categories

Quantum categories were introduced in [4] as generalizations of both bi(co)algebroids and small categories. We clarify details of that work. In particular, we show explicitly how the monadic definition of a quantum category unpacks to a set of axioms close to the definitions of a bialgebroid in the Hopf algebraic literature. We define notions of functor and natural transformation for quantum categories.Comment: Revised and expanded. A lot of diagrams. 40 page

What is a categorical model of arrows?

We investigate what the correct categorical formulation of Hughes’ Arrows should be. It has long been folklore that Arrows, a functional programming construct, and Freyd categories, a categorical notion due to Power, Robinson and Thielecke, are somehow equivalent. In this paper, we show that the situation is more subtle. By considering Arrows wholly within the base category we derive two alternative formulations of Freyd category that are equivalent to Arrows—enriched Freyd categories and indexed Freyd categories. By imposing a further condition, we characterise those indexed Freyd categories that are isomorphic to Freyd categories. The key differentiating point is the number of inputs available to a computation and the structure available on them, where structured input is modelled using comonads