Special Issue for the 13th International Conference on "FOUNDATIONS OF SOFTWARE SCIENCE AND COMPUTATION STRUCTURES" FOSSACS 2010

2010 Editor: Luke Ong


1. Reachability Analysis of Communicating Pushdown Systems

Alexander Heussner ; Jérôme Leroux ; Anca Muscholl ; Grégoire Sutre.
The reachability analysis of recursive programs that communicate asynchronously over reliable FIFO channels calls for restrictions to ensure decidability. Our first result characterizes communication topologies with a decidable reachability problem restricted to eager runs (i.e., runs where messages are either received immediately after being sent, or never received). The problem is EXPTIME-complete in the decidable case. The second result is a doubly exponential time algorithm for bounded context analysis in this setting, together with a matching lower bound. Both results extend and improve previous work from La Torre et al.

2. Degrees of Lookahead in Regular Infinite Games

Michael Holtmann ; Lukasz Kaiser ; Wolfgang Thomas.
We study variants of regular infinite games where the strict alternation of moves between the two players is subject to modifications. The second player may postpone a move for a finite number of steps, or, in other words, exploit in his strategy some lookahead on the moves of the opponent. This captures situations in distributed systems, e.g. when buffers are present in communication or when signal transmission between components is deferred. We distinguish strategies with different degrees of lookahead, among them being the continuous and the bounded lookahead strategies. In the first case the lookahead is of finite possibly unbounded size, whereas in the second case it is of bounded size. We show that for regular infinite games the solvability by continuous strategies is decidable, and that a continuous strategy can always be reduced to one of bounded lookahead. Moreover, this lookahead is at most doubly exponential in the size of a given parity automaton recognizing the winning condition. We also show that the result fails for non-regular gamesxwhere the winning condition is given by a context-free omega-language.

3. Linear-use CPS translations in the Enriched Effect Calculus

Jeff Egger ; Rasmus Ejlers Møgelberg ; Alex Simpson.
The enriched effect calculus (EEC) is an extension of Moggi's computational metalanguage with a selection of primitives from linear logic. This paper explores the enriched effect calculus as a target language for continuation-passing-style (CPS) translations in which the typing of the translations enforces the linear usage of continuations. We first observe that established call-by-value and call-by name linear-use CPS translations of simply-typed lambda-calculus into intuitionistic linear logic (ILL) land in the fragment of ILL given by EEC. These two translations are uniformly generalised by a single generic translation of the enriched effect calculus into itself. As our main theorem, we prove that the generic self-translation of EEC is involutive up to isomorphism. As corollaries, we obtain full completeness results, both for the generic translation, and for the original call-by-value and call-by-name translations.

4. Parameterised Multiparty Session Types

Pierre-Malo Denielou ; Nobuko Yoshida ; Andi Bejleri ; Raymond Hu.
For many application-level distributed protocols and parallel algorithms, the set of participants, the number of messages or the interaction structure are only known at run-time. This paper proposes a dependent type theory for multiparty sessions which can statically guarantee type-safe, deadlock-free multiparty interactions among processes whose specifications are parameterised by indices. We use the primitive recursion operator from Gödel's System T to express a wide range of communication patterns while keeping type checking decidable. To type individual distributed processes, a parameterised global type is projected onto a generic generator which represents a class of all possible end-point types. We prove the termination of the type-checking algorithm in the full system with both multiparty session types and recursive types. We illustrate our type theory through non-trivial programming and verification examples taken from parallel algorithms and Web services usecases.

5. Monads need not be endofunctors

Thosten Altenkirch ; James Chapman ; Tarmo Uustalu.
We introduce a generalization of monads, called relative monads, allowing for underlying functors between different categories. Examples include finite-dimensional vector spaces, untyped and typed lambda-calculus syntax and indexed containers. We show that the Kleisli and Eilenberg-Moore constructions carry over to relative monads and are related to relative adjunctions. Under reasonable assumptions, relative monads are monoids in the functor category concerned and extend to monads, giving rise to a coreflection between relative monads and monads. Arrows are also an instance of relative monads.

6. Abstract GSOS Rules and a Modular Treatment of Recursive Definitions

Stefan Milius ; Lawrence S Moss ; Daniel Schwencke.
Terminal coalgebras for a functor serve as semantic domains for state-based systems of various types. For example, behaviors of CCS processes, streams, infinite trees, formal languages and non-well-founded sets form terminal coalgebras. We present a uniform account of the semantics of recursive definitions in terminal coalgebras by combining two ideas: (1) abstract GSOS rules l specify additional algebraic operations on a terminal coalgebra; (2) terminal coalgebras are also initial completely iterative algebras (cias). We also show that an abstract GSOS rule leads to new extended cia structures on the terminal coalgebra. Then we formalize recursive function definitions involving given operations specified by l as recursive program schemes for l, and we prove that unique solutions exist in the extended cias. From our results it follows that the solutions of recursive (function) definitions in terminal coalgebras may be used in subsequent recursive definitions which still have unique solutions. We call this principle modularity. We illustrate our results by the five concrete terminal coalgebras mentioned above, e.\,g., a finite stream circuit defines a unique stream function.