The Category Theoretic Solution of Recursive Program Schemes

TL;DR

This paper develops a category-theoretic framework for recursive program schemes, unifying various semantics and including classical examples like the Cantor set, without relying on order or metric structures.

Contribution

It introduces a general algebraic approach to recursive schemes in categories with enough final coalgebras, extending previous methods and encompassing classical and non-traditional objects.

Findings

Unified categorical framework for recursive schemes

Includes classical denotational semantics as special cases

Models objects like the Cantor set as solutions

Abstract

This paper provides a general account of the notion of recursive program schemes, studying both uninterpreted and interpreted solutions. It can be regarded as the category-theoretic version of the classical area of algebraic semantics. The overall assumptions needed are small indeed: working only in categories with "enough final coalgebras" we show how to formulate, solve, and study recursive program schemes. Our general theory is algebraic and so avoids using ordered, or metric structures. Our work generalizes the previous approaches which do use this extra structure by isolating the key concepts needed to study substitution in infinite trees, including second-order substitution. As special cases of our interpreted solutions we obtain the usual denotational semantics using complete partial orders, and the one using complete metric spaces. Our theory also encompasses implicitly defined objects which are not usually taken to be related to recursive program schemes. For example, the classical Cantor two-thirds set falls out as an interpreted solution (in our sense) of a recursive program scheme.