Paper: Environmental Bisimulations for Higher-Order Languages (at LICS 2007)

Authors: Davide Sangiorgi Naoki Kobayashi Eijiro Sumii

Abstract

Developing a theory of bisimulation in higher-order languages can be hard. Particularly challenging can be: (1) the proof of congruence, as well as enhancements of the bisimulation proof method with "up-to context" techniques, and (2) obtaining definitions and results that scale to languages with different features. To meet these challenges, we present environmental bisimulations, a form of bisimulation for higher-order languages, and its basic theory. We consider four representative calculi: pure \lambda-calculi (call-by-name and call-by-value), call-by-value \lambda-calculus with higher-order store, and then Higher-Order \pi-calculus. In each case: we present the basic properties of environmental bisimilarity, including congruence; we show that it coincides with contextual equivalence; we develop some up-to techniques, including up-to context, as examples of possible enhancements of the associated bisimulation method. Unlike previous approaches (such as applicative bisimulations, logical relations, Sumii-Pierce-Koutavas-Wand), our method does not require induction/indices on evaluation derivation/steps (which may complicate the proofs of congruence, transitivity, and the combination with up-to techniques), or sophisticated methods such as Howe’s for proving congruence. It also scales from the pure \lambda-calculi to the richer calculi with simple congruence proofs.

BibTeX

  @InProceedings{SangiorgiKobayashiS-EnvironmentalBisimu,
    author = 	 {Davide Sangiorgi and Naoki Kobayashi and Eijiro Sumii},
    title = 	 {Environmental Bisimulations for Higher-Order Languages},
    booktitle =  {Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2007)},
    year =	 {2007},
    month =	 {July}, 
    pages =      {293--302},
    location =   {Wroclaw, Poland}, 
    publisher =	 {IEEE Computer Society Press}
  }