Decomposing Comonad Morphisms

The analysis of set comonads whose underlying functor is a container functor in terms of directed containers makes it a simple observation that any morphism between two such comonads factors through a third one by two comonad morphisms, whereof the first is identity on shapes and the second is identity on positions in every shape. This observation turns out to generalize into a much more involved result about comonad morphisms to comonads whose underlying functor preserves Cartesian natural transformations to itself on any category with finite limits. The bijection between comonad coalgebras and comonad morphisms from costate comonads thus also yields a decomposition of comonad coalgebras

Polynomial functors and polynomial monads

We study polynomial functors over locally cartesian closed categories. After setting up the basic theory, we show how polynomial functors assemble into a double category, in fact a framed bicategory. We show that the free monad on a polynomial endofunctor is polynomial. The relationship with operads and other related notions is explored.Comment: 41 pages, latex, 2 ps figures generated at runtime by the texdraw package (does not compile with pdflatex). v2: removed assumptions on sums, added short discussion of generalisation, and more details on tensorial strength

Tealeaves: Structured Monads for Generic First-Order Abstract Syntax Infrastructure

Verifying the metatheory of a formal system in Coq involves a lot of tedious "infrastructural" reasoning about variable binders. We present Tealeaves, a generic framework for first-order representations of variable binding that can be used to develop this sort of infrastructure once and for all. Given a particular strategy for representing binders concretely, such as locally nameless or de Bruijn indices, Tealeaves allows developers to implement modules of generic infrastructure called backends that end users can simply instantiate to their own syntax. Our framework rests on a novel abstraction of first-order abstract syntax called a decorated traversable monad (DTM) whose equational theory provides reasoning principles that replace tedious induction on terms. To evaluate Tealeaves, we have implemented a multisorted locally nameless backend providing generic versions of the lemmas generated by LNgen. We discuss case studies where we instantiate this generic infrastructure to simply-typed and polymorphic lambda calculi, comparing our approach to other utilities

Polynomial functors and polynomial monads

We study polynomial functors over locally cartesian closed categories. After setting up the basic theory, we show how polynomial functors assemble into a double category, in fact a framed bicategory. We show that the free monad on a polynomial endofunctor is polynomial. The relationship with operads and other related notions is explored

Complexity bounds for container functors and comonads

The notion of containers, due to Abbott et al., characterises a subset of parametric data types which can be described by a set of shapes and a set of positions for each shape. This includes common data types such as tuples, lists, trees, arrays, and graphs. Various useful categorical structures can be derived for containers that have some additional structure on their shapes and positions. For example, the notion of a directed container (due to Ahman et al.) gives rise to container comonads. Containers, and refinements such as directed containers, provide a useful reasoning tool for data types and an abstraction mechanism for programming, e.g., building libraries parameterised over containers. This paper studies the performance characteristics of traversal schemes over containers modelled by additional functor and comonad structure. A cost model for container transformations is defined from which complexity bounds for the operations of container functors and comonads are derived. This provides a reasoning principle for the performance of programs structured using these idioms, suggesting optimisations which follow from the underling mathematical structure. Due to the abstract interface provided by the syntax of containers and category theory, the complexity bounds and subsequent optimisations they imply are implementation agnostic (machine free). As far as we are aware, this is the first such study of the performance characteristics of containers

Linear Dependent Type Theory for Quantum Programming Languages

Modern quantum programming languages integrate quantum resources and classical control. They must, on the one hand, be linearly typed to reflect the no-cloning property of quantum resources. On the other hand, high-level and practical languages should also support quantum circuits as first-class citizens, as well as families of circuits that are indexed by some classical parameters. Quantum programming languages thus need linear dependent type theory. This paper defines a general semantic structure for such a type theory via certain fibrations of monoidal categories. The categorical model of the quantum circuit description language Proto-Quipper-M by Rios and Selinger (2017) constitutes an example of such a fibration, which means that the language can readily be integrated with dependent types. We then devise both a general linear dependent type system and a dependently typed extension of Proto-Quipper-M, and provide them with operational semantics as well as a prototype implementation

Laying Tiles Ornamentally: An approach to structuring container traversals

Having hardware more capable of parallel execution means that more program scheduling decisions have to be taken to utilize that hardware efficiently. To this end, compilers implement coarse-grained loop transformations in addition to traditionally used fine-grained instruction reordering. Implementors of embedded domain specific languages have to face a difficult choice: to translate operations on collections to a low-level language naively hoping that its optimizer will do the job, or to implement their own optimizer as a part of the EDSL.<br /><br />We turn ourselves to the concept of loop tiling from the imperative world and find its equivalent for recursive functions. We show the construction of a <em>tiled</em> functorial map over containers that can be naively translated to a corresponding nested loop.<br /><br />We illustrate the connection between <em>untiled</em> and tiled functorial maps by means of a type-theoretic notion of <em>algebraic ornament</em>. This approach produces an family of container traversals indexed by <em>tile sizes</em> and serves as a basis of a proof that untiled and tiled functorial maps have the same semantics.<br /><br />We evaluate our approach by designing a language of tree traversals as a DSL embedded into Haskell which compiles into C code. We use this language to implement tiled and untiled tree traversals which we benchmark under varying choices of tile sizes and shapes of input trees. For some tree shapes, we show that a tiled tree traversal can be up to 50% faster than an untiled one under a good choice of the tile size