52,191 research outputs found
Inversion, Iteration, and the Art of Dual Wielding
The humble ("dagger") is used to denote two different operations in
category theory: Taking the adjoint of a morphism (in dagger categories) and
finding the least fixed point of a functional (in categories enriched in
domains). While these two operations are usually considered separately from one
another, the emergence of reversible notions of computation shows the need to
consider how the two ought to interact. In the present paper, we wield both of
these daggers at once and consider dagger categories enriched in domains. We
develop a notion of a monotone dagger structure as a dagger structure that is
well behaved with respect to the enrichment, and show that such a structure
leads to pleasant inversion properties of the fixed points that arise as a
result. Notably, such a structure guarantees the existence of fixed point
adjoints, which we show are intimately related to the conjugates arising from a
canonical involutive monoidal structure in the enrichment. Finally, we relate
the results to applications in the design and semantics of reversible
programming languages.Comment: Accepted for RC 201
Combining and Relating Control Effects and their Semantics
Combining local exceptions and first class continuations leads to programs
with complex control flow, as well as the possibility of expressing powerful
constructs such as resumable exceptions. We describe and compare games models
for a programming language which includes these features, as well as
higher-order references. They are obtained by contrasting methodologies: by
annotating sequences of moves with "control pointers" indicating where
exceptions are thrown and caught, and by composing the exceptions and
continuations monads.
The former approach allows an explicit representation of control flow in
games for exceptions, and hence a straightforward proof of definability (full
abstraction) by factorization, as well as offering the possibility of a
semantic approach to control flow analysis of exception-handling. However,
establishing soundness of such a concrete and complex model is a non-trivial
problem. It may be resolved by establishing a correspondence with the monad
semantics, based on erasing explicit exception moves and replacing them with
control pointers.Comment: In Proceedings COS 2013, arXiv:1309.092
A Characterization for Decidable Separability by Piecewise Testable Languages
The separability problem for word languages of a class by
languages of a class asks, for two given languages and
from , whether there exists a language from that
includes and excludes , that is, and . In this work, we assume some mild closure properties for
and study for which such classes separability by a piecewise
testable language (PTL) is decidable. We characterize these classes in terms of
decidability of (two variants of) an unboundedness problem. From this, we
deduce that separability by PTL is decidable for a number of language classes,
such as the context-free languages and languages of labeled vector addition
systems. Furthermore, it follows that separability by PTL is decidable if and
only if one can compute for any language of the class its downward closure wrt.
the scattered substring ordering (i.e., if the set of scattered substrings of
any language of the class is effectively regular).
The obtained decidability results contrast some undecidability results. In
fact, for all (non-regular) language classes that we present as examples with
decidable separability, it is undecidable whether a given language is a PTL
itself.
Our characterization involves a result of independent interest, which states
that for any kind of languages and , non-separability by PTL is
equivalent to the existence of common patterns in and
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