Logical Dreams

We discuss the past and future of set theory, axiom systems and independence results. We deal in particular with cardinal arithmetic

Extensional Collapse Situations I: non-termination and unrecoverable errors

We consider a simple model of higher order, functional computation over the booleans. Then, we enrich the model in order to encompass non-termination and unrecoverable errors, taken separately or jointly. We show that the models so defined form a lattice when ordered by the extensional collapse situation relation, introduced in order to compare models with respect to the amount of "intensional information" that they provide on computation. The proofs are carried out by exhibiting suitable applied {\lambda}-calculi, and by exploiting the fundamental lemma of logical relations

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

Probabilistic call by push value

We introduce a probabilistic extension of Levy's Call-By-Push-Value. This extension consists simply in adding a " flipping coin " boolean closed atomic expression. This language can be understood as a major generalization of Scott's PCF encompassing both call-by-name and call-by-value and featuring recursive (possibly lazy) data types. We interpret the language in the previously introduced denotational model of probabilistic coherence spaces, a categorical model of full classical Linear Logic, interpreting data types as coalgebras for the resource comonad. We prove adequacy and full abstraction, generalizing earlier results to a much more realistic and powerful programming language

Initial Semantics for Reduction Rules

We give an algebraic characterization of the syntax and operational semantics of a class of simply-typed languages, such as the language PCF: we characterize simply-typed syntax with variable binding and equipped with reduction rules via a universal property, namely as the initial object of some category of models. For this purpose, we employ techniques developed in two previous works: in the first work we model syntactic translations between languages over different sets of types as initial morphisms in a category of models. In the second work we characterize untyped syntax with reduction rules as initial object in a category of models. In the present work, we combine the techniques used earlier in order to characterize simply-typed syntax with reduction rules as initial object in a category. The universal property yields an operator which allows to specify translations---that are semantically faithful by construction---between languages over possibly different sets of types. As an example, we upgrade a translation from PCF to the untyped lambda calculus, given in previous work, to account for reduction in the source and target. Specifically, we specify a reduction semantics in the source and target language through suitable rules. By equipping the untyped lambda calculus with the structure of a model of PCF, initiality yields a translation from PCF to the lambda calculus, that is faithful with respect to the reduction semantics specified by the rules. This paper is an extended version of an article published in the proceedings of WoLLIC 2012.Comment: Extended version of arXiv:1206.4547, proves a variant of a result of PhD thesis arXiv:1206.455

The variable containment problem

The essentially free variables of a term $t$ in some $\lambda$-calculus, FV $_{\beta}(t)$, form the set ($x$ $_{\mid}^{\mid}$ $\forall u.t=_{\beta}u\Rightarrow x$ $\epsilon$ FV$(u)$}. This set is significant once we consider equivalence classes of $\lambda$-terms rather than $\lambda$-terms themselves, as for instance in higher-order rewriting. An important problem for (generalised) higher-order rewrite systems is the variable containment problem: given two terms $t$ and $u$, do we have for all substitutions $\theta$ and contexts $C$[] that FV$_{\beta}(C[t]^{\theta}) \supseteq$ FV$_{\beta}(C[u^{\theta}])$? This property is important when we want to consider $t \to u$ as a rewrite rule and keep $n$-step rewriting decidable. Variable containment is in general not implied by FV $_{\beta} (t)\supseteq$ FV$_{\beta}(u)$. We give a decision procedure for the variable containment problem of the second-order fragment of $\lambda^{\to}$. For full $\lambda^{\to}$ we show the equivalence of variable containment to an open problem in the theory of PCF; this equivalence also shows that the problem is decidable in the third-order case