Presentable signatures and initial semantics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for specifying and reasoning about syntax in programming languages and logics using initial semantics, with a focus on signatures that generate syntax and their compositional properties.

Contribution

It defines a notion of presentable signatures that encompass classical algebraic signatures and extend to complex syntactic constructions, ensuring existence of generated syntax.

Findings

Identifies a large class of signatures that generate syntax.

Provides a compositional framework for complex syntactic constructions.

Main results are verified within the UniMath proof system.

Abstract

We present a device for specifying and reasoning about syntax for datatypes, programming languages, and logic calculi. More precisely, we study a notion of "signature" for specifying syntactic constructions. In the spirit of Initial Semantics, we define the "syntax generated by a signature" to be the initial object -- if it exists -- in a suitable category of models. In our framework, the existence of an associated syntax to a signature is not automatically guaranteed. We identify, via the notion of presentation of a signature, a large class of signatures that do generate a syntax. Our (presentable) signatures subsume classical algebraic signatures (i.e., signatures for languages with variable binding, such as the pure lambda calculus) and extend them to include several other significant examples of syntactic constructions. One key feature of our notions of signature, syntax, and presentation is that they are highly compositional, in the sense that complex examples can be obtained by gluing simpler ones. Moreover, through the Initial Semantics approach, our framework provides, beyond the desired algebra of terms, a well-behaved substitution and the induction and recursion principles associated to the syntax. This paper builds upon ideas from a previous attempt by Hirschowitz-Maggesi, which, in turn, was directly inspired by some earlier work of Ghani-Uustalu-Hamana and Matthes-Uustalu. The main results presented in the paper are computer-checked within the UniMath system.