We introduce an algebraic approach to the metatheory of formal systems of term assertions akin to those of structural and natural operational semantics, type theories, rewriting systems, and equational theories. We rest on Term Relation Algebras, viz. pointfree algebras of structurally-defined predicates on terms, to give a common algebraic semantics to different kinds of formal systems, regardless of their inferential mechanisms and underlying term structures. This enables abstract reasoning about formal systems, and their metatheory, through the algebra of the term predicates they define. We give a faithfully term-free algebraization of semantically-relevant term predicates, such as parallel reduction, big-step evaluation, and applicative bisimilarity. We extend this algebraization also to fundamental metatheoretical properties of these notions - including congruence of applicative bisimilarity, determinacy of evaluation, and confluence of reduction - and prove these properties using algebraic methods.

We extend intersection types to a computational \(\lambda\) -calculus with algebraic operations à la Plotkin and Power. We achieve this by considering monadic intersections—whereby computational effects appear not only in the operational semantics but also in the type system . Since in the effectful setting, termination is not anymore the only property of interest, we want to analyze the interactive behavior of typed programs with the environment. Indeed, our type system can characterize the natural notion of observation, both in the finitary and in the infinitary setting. In a second phase, we extend our system with subtyping to incorporate a richer class of effects via monads on preorders instead of sets allowing us to model in particular non-determinism. The main technical tool is a novel combination of syntactic techniques with abstract relational reasoning, which allows us to lift all the required notions, for example, of typability and logical relation, to the monadic setting.

Abstract We extend intersection types to a computational $$\lambda $$ λ -calculus with algebraic operations à la Plotkin and Power. We achieve this by considering monadic intersections—whereby computational effects appear not only in the operational semantics, but also in the type system . Since in the effectful setting termination is not anymore the only property of interest, we want to analyze the interactive behavior of typed programs with the environment. Indeed, our type system is able to characterize the natural notion of observation, both in the finite and in the infinitary setting, and for a wide class of effects, such as output, cost, pure and probabilistic nondeterminism, and combinations thereof. The main technical tool is a novel combination of syntactic techniques with abstract relational reasoning, which allows us to lift all the required notions, e.g. of typability and logical relation, to the monadic setting.

Logical relations built on top of an operational semantics are one of the most successful proof methods in programming language semantics. In recent years, more and more expressive notions of operationally-based logical relations have been designed and applied to specific families of languages. However, a unifying abstract framework for operationally-based logical relations is still missing. We show how fibrations can provide a uniform treatment of operational logical relations, using as reference example a lambda-calculus with generic effects endowed with a novel, abstract operational semantics defined on a large class of categories. Moreover, this abstract perspective allows us to give a solid mathematical ground also to differential logical relations -- a recently introduced notion of higher-order distance between programs -- both pure and effectful, bringing them back to a common picture with traditional ones.

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Moving from the mathematical theory of (abstract) syntax, we develop a general relational theory of symbolic manipulation parametric with respect to, and accounting for, general notions of syntax. We model syntax relying on categorical notions, such as free algebras and monads, and show that a general theory of symbolic manipulation in the style of rewriting systems can be obtained by extending such notions to an allegorical setting. This way, we obtain an augmented calculus of relations accounting for syntax-based rewriting. We witness the effectiveness of the relational approach by generalising and unifying milestones results in rewriting, such as the parallel moves and the Tait-Martin-Löf techniques.

Programming language semantics traditionally deals with qualitative properties of programs, that is, properties that a program may either satisfy or not, like termination or correctness.Moreover, program semantics generally attribute programs a meaning, typically a function of some kind, so as to be able to identify programs which behave in the same way in all contexts (i.e., which have the same meaning).This can be done in many different ways, from observational equivalence -the coarsest adequate congruence -to various forms of formal systems in the style of equational logic, to denotational semantics.Nevertheless, the past ten years have seen the introduction of a series of logical and semantic frameworks which go significantly beyond this picture: on the one hand, frameworks enabling the expression of quantitative properties, i.e., properties that a program may satisfy to a certain extent or up to a certain error (e.g., probabilistic termination or correctness up to some error probability or some approximation error).Moreover, the meaning attributed to programs may allow the latter to be compared in quantitative ways, that is, as behaving in a similar, although not exactly equivalent, way, or to analyze how sensitive programs are to variations in their input.We refer here, for example, to approaches like behavioral and program metrics, differential semantics, automatic differentiation, sensitivity analysis and its application to differential privacy.These frameworks have progressively led to integrate methods coming from probabilistic programming, approximate and incremental computing, as well as machine learning within several standard theoretical approaches to program semantics.This special issue is meant to collect contributions along these lines and comprises the following five papers:• "Up-To Techniques for Behavioural Metrics via Fibrations, " by Bonchi, König, and Petrisan.This deals with the problem of deriving enhancements to the metric analog of the bisimulation proof method in an abstract way and with how categorical fibrations turn out to be a powerful tool for that.• "Bisimulation and Behavioural Equivalences for Continuous-time Markov Processes," by Chen, Clerc, and Panangaden.This contribution gives a unified view of various notions of behavioral equivalence and bisimulation for probabilistic transition systems whose time evolution is continuous rather than discrete.• "Coherent Differentiation," by Ehrhard.This paper introduces a new categorical framework for higher order program differentiation.In contrast to usual approaches based on the differential λ-calculus, this new framework does not require additivity (hence nondeterminism), and is thus compatible with both deterministic and probabilistic computational models.

We introduce a general theory of quantitative and metric rewriting systems, namely systems with a rewriting relation enriched over quantales modelling abstract quantities. We develop theories of abstract and term-based systems, refining cornerstone results of rewriting theory (such as Newman’s Lemma, Church-Rosser Theorem, and critical pair-like lemmas) to a metric and quantitative setting. To avoid distance trivialisation and lack of confluence issues, we introduce non-expansive, linear term rewriting systems, and then generalise the latter to the novel class of graded term rewriting systems. These systems make quantitative rewriting modal and context-sensitive, this way endowing rewriting with coeffectful behaviours.

Logical relations built on top of an operational semantics are one of the most successful proof methods in programming language semantics. In recent years, more and more expressive notions of operationally-based logical relations have been designed and applied to specific families of languages. However, a unifying abstract framework for operationally-based logical relations is still missing. We show how fibrations can provide a uniform treatment of operational logical relations, using as reference example a λ-calculus with generic effects endowed with a novel, abstract operational semantics defined on a large class of categories. Moreover, this abstract perspective allows us to give a solid mathematical ground also to differential logical relations - a recently introduced notion of higher-order distance between programs - both pure and effectful, bringing them back to a common picture with traditional ones.

We study the nature of applicative bisimilarity in λ-calculi endowed with operators for sampling from contin- uous distributions. On the one hand, we show that bisimilarity, logical equivalence, and testing equivalence all coincide with contextual equivalence when real numbers can be manipulated through continuous functions only. The key ingredient towards this result is a notion of Feller-continuity for labelled Markov processes, which we believe of independent interest, giving rise a broad class of LMPs for which coinductive and logically inspired equivalences coincide. On the other hand, we show that if no constraint is put on the way real numbers are manipulated, characterizing contextual equivalence turns out to be hard, and most of the aforementioned notions of equivalence are even unsound.

Semantics is traditionally concerned with program equivalence, in which all pairs of programs which are not equivalent are treated the same, and simply dubbed as incomparable. In recent years, various forms of program metrics have been introduced such that the distance between non-equivalent programs is measured as an element of an appropriate quantale. By letting the underlying quantale vary as the type of the compared programs become more complex, the recently introduced framework of differential logical relations allows for a new contextual form of reasoning. In this paper, we show that all this can be generalised to effectful higher-order programs, in which not only the values , but also the effects computations produce can be appropriately distanced in a principled way. We show that the resulting framework is flexible, allowing various forms of effects to be handled, and that it provides compact and informative judgments about program differences.

Graded modal types systems and coeffects are becoming a standard formalism to deal with context-dependent, usage-sensitive computations, especially when combined with computational effects. From a semantic perspective, effectful and coeffectful languages have been studied mostly by means of denotational semantics and almost nothing has been done from the point of view of relational reasoning. This gap in the literature is quite surprising, since many cornerstone results — such as non-interference , metric preservation , and proof irrelevance — on concrete coeffects are inherently relational. In this paper, we fill this gap by developing a general theory and calculus of program relations for higher-order languages with combined effects and coeffects. The relational calculus builds upon the novel notion of a corelator (or comonadic lax extension ) to handle coeffects relationally. Inside such a calculus, we define three notions of effectful and coeffectful program refinements: contextual approximation , logical preorder , and applicative similarity . These are the first operationally-based notions of program refinement (and, consequently, equivalence) for languages with combined effects and coeffects appearing in the literature. We show that the axiomatics of a corelator (together with the one of a relator) is precisely what is needed to prove all the aforementioned program refinements to be precongruences, this way obtaining compositional relational techniques for reasoning about combined effects and coeffects.

We investigate program equivalence for linear higher-order(sequential) languages endowed with primitives for computational effects. More specifically, we study operationally-based notions of program equivalence for a linear $λ$-calculus with explicit copying and algebraic effects \emph{à la} Plotkin and Power. Such a calculus makes explicit the interaction between copying and linearity, which are intensional aspects of computation, with effects, which are, instead, \emph{extensional}. We review some of the notions of equivalences for linear calculi proposed in the literature and show their limitations when applied to effectful calculi where copying is a first-class citizen. We then introduce resource transition systems, namely transition systems whose states are built over tuples of programs representing the available resources, as an operational semantics accounting for both intensional and extensional interactive behaviors of programs. Our main result is a sound and complete characterization of contextual equivalence as trace equivalence defined on top of resource transition systems.

Motivated by the study of effectful programming languages and computations, we introduce a relational theory of monadic rewriting systems. The latter are rewriting systems whose notion of reduction is effectful, where effects are modelled as monads. Contrary to what happens in the ordinary operational semantics of monadic programming languages, defining meaningful notions of monadic rewriting turns out to problematic for several monads, including the distribution, powerset, reader, and global state monad. This raises the question of when monadic rewriting is possible. We answer that question by identifying a class of monads, known as weakly cartesian monads, that guarantee monadic rewriting to be well-behaved. In case monads are given as equational theories, as it is the case for algebraic effects, we also show that a sufficient condition to have a well-behaved notion of monadic rewriting is that all equations in the theory are linear. Finally, we apply the abstract theory of monadic rewriting systems to the call-by-value λ-calculus with algebraic effects, this way obtaining effectful (surface) standardisation and confluence theorems.

Abstract Logical relations are one among the most powerful techniques in the theory of programming languages, and have been used extensively for proving properties of a variety of higher-order calculi. However, there are properties that cannot be immediately proved by means of logical relations, for instance program continuity and differentiability in higher-order languages extended with real-valued functions. Informally, the problem stems from the fact that these properties are naturally expressed on terms of non-ground type (or, equivalently, on open terms of base type), and there is no apparent good definition for a base case (i.e. for closed terms of ground types). To overcome this issue, we study a generalization of the concept of a logical relation, called open logical relation , and prove that it can be fruitfully applied in several contexts in which the property of interest is about expressions of first-order type. Our setting is a simply-typed $$\lambda $$ λ -calculus enriched with real numbers and real-valued first-order functions from a given set, such as the one of continuous or differentiable functions. We first prove a containment theorem stating that for any collection of real-valued first-order functions including projection functions and closed under function composition, any well-typed term of first-order type denotes a function belonging to that collection. Then, we show by way of open logical relations the correctness of the core of a recently published algorithm for forward automatic differentiation. Finally, we define a refinement-based type system for local continuity in an extension of our calculus with conditionals, and prove the soundness of the type system using open logical relations.

Normal form bisimulation, also known as open bisimulation, is a coinductive technique for higher-order program equivalence in which programs are compared by looking at their essentially infinitary tree-like normal forms, i.e. at their Böhm or Lévy-Longo trees. The technique has been shown to be useful not only when proving metatheorems about $$\lambda $$ -calculi and their semantics, but also when looking at concrete examples of terms. In this paper, we show that there is a way to generalise normal form bisimulation to calculi with algebraic effects, à la Plotkin and Power. We show that some mild conditions on monads and relators, which have already been shown to guarantee effectful applicative bisimilarity to be a congruence relation, are enough to prove that the obtained notion of bisimilarity, which we call effectful normal form bisimilarity, is a congruence relation, and thus sound for contextual equivalence. Additionally, contrary to applicative bisimilarity, normal form bisimilarity allows for enhancements of the bisimulation proof method, hence proving a powerful reasoning principle for effectful programming languages.

We introduce a new form of logical relation which, in the spirit of metric relations, allows us to assign each pair of programs a quantity measuring their distance, rather than a boolean value standing for their being equivalent. The novelty of differential logical relations consists in measuring the distance between terms not (necessarily) by a numerical value, but by a mathematical object which somehow reflects the interactive complexity, i.e. the type, of the compared terms. We exemplify this concept in the simply-typed lambda-calculus, and show a form of soundness theorem. We also see how ordinary logical relations and metric relations can be seen as instances of differential logical relations. Finally, we show that differential logical relations can be organised in a cartesian closed category, contrarily to metric relations, which are well-known not to have such a structure, but only that of a monoidal closed category.

This paper studies quantitative refinements of Abramsky's applicative similarity and bisimilarity in the context of a generalisation of Fuzz, a call-by-value λ-calculus with a linear type system that can express program sensitivity, enriched with algebraic operations à la Plotkin and Power. To do so a general, abstract framework for studying behavioural relations taking values over quantales is introduced according to Lawvere's analysis of generalised metric spaces. Barr's notion of relator (or lax extension) is then extended to quantale-valued relations, adapting and extending results from the field of monoidal topology. Abstract notions of quantale-valued effectful applicative similarity and bisimilarity are then defined and proved to be a compatible generalised metric (in the sense of Lawvere) and pseudometric, respectively, under mild conditions.

We study Abramsky's applicative bisimilarity abstractly, in the context of call-by-value λ-calculi with algebraic effects. We first of all endow a computational λ-calculus with a monadic operational semantics. We then show how the theory of relators provides precisely what is needed to generalise applicative bisimilarity to such a calculus, and to single out those monads and relators for which applicative bisimilarity is a congruence, thus a sound methodology for program equivalence. This is done by studying Howe's method in the abstract.