On the confluence of lambda-calculus with conditional rewriting

The confluence of untyped \lambda-calculus with unconditional rewriting is now well un- derstood. In this paper, we investigate the confluence of \lambda-calculus with conditional rewriting and provide general results in two directions. First, when conditional rules are algebraic. This extends results of M\"uller and Dougherty for unconditional rewriting. Two cases are considered, whether \beta-reduction is allowed or not in the evaluation of conditions. Moreover, Dougherty's result is improved from the assumption of strongly normalizing \beta-reduction to weakly normalizing \beta-reduction. We also provide examples showing that outside these conditions, modularity of confluence is difficult to achieve. Second, we go beyond the algebraic framework and get new confluence results using a restricted notion of orthogonality that takes advantage of the conditional part of rewrite rules

Substitution, jumps, and algebraic effects

Contains fulltext : 129931.pdf (author's version ) (Open Access

Handling Fibred Algebraic Effects

International audienceWe study algebraic computational effects and their handlers in the dependently typed setting. We describecomputational effects using a generalisation of Plotkin and Pretnar’s effect theories, whose dependentlytyped operations allow us to capture precise notions of computation, e.g., state with location-dependent storetypes and dependently typed update monads. Our treatment of handlers is based on an observation that theirconventional term-level definition leads to unsound program equivalences being derivable in languages thatinclude a notion of homomorphism. We solve this problem by giving handlers a novel type-based treatmentvia a new computation type, the user-defined algebra type, which pairs a value type (the carrier) with a set ofvalue terms (the operations), capturing Plotkin and Pretnar’s insight that effect handlers denote algebras. Wethen show that the conventional presentation of handlers can be routinely derived, and demonstrate that thistype-based treatment of handlers provides a useful mechanism for reasoning about effectful computations.We also equip the resulting language with a sound denotational semantics based on families fibrations

Initiality for Typed Syntax and Semantics

We give an algebraic characterization of the syntax and semantics of a class of simply-typed languages, such as the language PCF: we characterize simply-typed binding syntax equipped with reduction rules via a universal property, namely as the initial object of some category. For this purpose, we employ techniques developed in two previous works: in [2], we model syntactic translations between languages over different sets of types as initial morphisms in a category of models. In [1], we characterize untyped syntax with reduction rules as initial object in a category of models. In the present work, we show that those techniques are modular enough to be combined: we thus 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. We specify a language by a 2-signature, that is, a signature on two levels: the syntactic level specifies the types and terms of the language, and associates a type to each term. The semantic level specifies, through inequations, reduction rules on the terms of the language. To any given 2-signature we associate a category of models. We prove that this category has an initial object, which integrates the types and terms freely generated by the 2-signature, and the reduction relation on those terms generated by the given inequations. We call this object the (programming) language generated by the 2-signature. [1] Ahrens, B.: Modules over relative monads for syntax and semantics (2011), arXiv:1107.5252, to be published in Math. Struct. in Comp. Science [2] Ahrens, B.: Extended Initiality for Typed Abstract Syntax. Logical Methods in Computer Science 8(2), 1-35 (2012)Comment: presented at WoLLIC 2012, 15 page