Constructing differential categories and deconstructing categories of games

James Laird, Giulio Manzonetto, Guy McCusker

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Abstract

Differential categories were introduced by Blute, Cockett and Seely to axiomatize categorically Ehrhard and Regnierʼs syntactic differential operator. We present an abstract construction that takes a symmetric monoidal category and yields a differential category, and show how this construction may be applied to categories of games. In one instance, we recover the category previously used to give a fully abstract model of a nondeterministic imperative language. The construction exposes the differential structure already present in this model, and shows how the differential combinator may be encoded in the imperative language. A second instance corresponds to a new cartesian differential category of games. We give a model of a simply-typed resource calculus, Resource PCF, in this category and show that it possesses the finite definability property. Comparison with a semantics based on Bucciarelli, Ehrhard and Manzonettoʼs relational model reveals that the latter also possesses this property and is fully abstract.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)247-264
Number of pages18
JournalInformation and Computation
Volume222
Early online date26 Oct 2012
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2013

Keywords

  • differential categories
  • game semantics
  • full abstraction

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