Symmetries, local names and dynamic (de)-allocation of names

  • Authors:
  • Vincenzo Ciancia;Ugo Montanari

  • Affiliations:
  • Università di Pisa, Dipartimento di Informatica, Largo Pontecorvo 3, 56127 Pisa, Italy;Università di Pisa, Dipartimento di Informatica, Largo Pontecorvo 3, 56127 Pisa, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Information and Computation
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The semantics of name-passing calculi is often defined employing coalgebraic models over presheaf categories. This elegant theory lacks finiteness properties, hence it is not apt to implementation. Coalgebras over named sets, called history-dependent automata, are better suited for the purpose due to locality of names. A theory of behavioural functors for named sets is still lacking: the semantics of each language has been given in an ad-hoc way, and algorithms were implemented only for the @p-calculus. Existence of the final coalgebra for the @p-calculus was never proved. We introduce a language of accessible functors to specify history-dependent automata in a modular way, leading to a clean formulation and a generalisation of previous results, and to the proof of existence of a final coalgebra in a wide range of cases.