2016-09-28: Guillaume Allais (Radboud University Nijmegen)

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:51:42 +0000

Guillaume Allais (Radboud University Nijmegen)

Towards a Generic Treatment of Syntaxes with Binding

Abstract

The techniques used by the generic programming community have taught us that we can greatly benefit from exposing the common internal structure of a family of objects. One can for instance derive once and for all a wealth of iterators from an abstract characterisation of recursive datatypes as fixpoints of functors.

Our previous work on type and scope preserving semantics and their properties has made us realise that numerous semantics of the lambda calculus can be presented as instances of the fundamental lemma associated to an abstract notion of 'Model'. This made it possible to avoid code duplication as well as prove these semantics' properties generically.

Putting these two ideas together, we give an abstract description of syntaxes with binding making both their recursive and scoping structure explicit. The fundamental lemma associated to these syntaxes can be instantiated to provide the user with proofs that its language is stable under renaming and substitution as well as provide a way to easily define various evaluators.

2016-09-28 15:00:00 UTC
LT1310