A Theory of Explicit Substitutions with Safe and Full Composition

Many different systems with explicit substitutions have been proposed to implement a large class of higher-order languages. Motivations and challenges that guided the development of such calculi in functional frameworks are surveyed in the first part of this paper. Then, very simple technology in named variable-style notation is used to establish a theory of explicit substitutions for the lambda-calculus which enjoys a whole set of useful properties such as full composition, simulation of one-step beta-reduction, preservation of beta-strong normalisation, strong normalisation of typed terms and confluence on metaterms. Normalisation of related calculi is also discussed.Comment: 29 pages Special Issue: Selected Papers of the Conference "International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming 2008" edited by Giuseppe Castagna and Igor Walukiewic

A Theory of Explicit Substitutions with Safe and Full Composition

Many different systems with explicit substitutions have been proposed to implement a large class of higher-order languages. Motivations and challenges that guided the development of such calculi in functional frameworks are surveyed in the first part of this paper. Then, very simple technology in named variable-style notation is used to establish a theory of explicit substitutions for the lambda-calculus which enjoys a whole set of useful properties such as full composition, simulation of one-step beta-reduction, preservation of beta-strong normalisation, strong normalisation of typed terms and confluence on metaterms. Normalisation of related calculi is also discussed

The theory of calculi with explicit substitutions revisited

Calculi with explicit substitutions (ES) are widely used in different areas of computer science. Complex systems with ES were developed these last 15 years to capture the good computational behaviour of the original systems (with meta-level substitutions) they were implementing. In this paper we first survey previous work in the domain by pointing out the motivations and challenges that guided the development of such calculi. Then we use very simple technology to establish a general theory of explicit substitutions for the lambda-calculus which enjoys fundamental properties such as simulation of one-step beta-reduction, confluence on metaterms, preservation of beta-strong normalisation, strong normalisation of typed terms and full composition. The calculus also admits a natural translation into Linear Logic’s proof-nets