No abstract

The last 15 years have seen an explosion in work on explicit substitution, most of which is done in the style of the λσ-calculus. In Kamareddine and Ríos (1995a), we extended the λ-calculus with explicit substitutions by turning de Bruijn's meta-operators into object-operators offering a style of explicit substitution that differs from that of λσ. The resulting calculus, λs, remains as close as possible to the λ-calculus from an intuitive point of view and, while preserving strong normalisation (Kamareddine and Ríos, 1995a), is extended in this paper to a confluent calculus on open terms: the λse-caculus. Since the establishment of these results, another calculus, λζ, came into being in Muñoz Hurtado (1996) which preserves strong normalisation and is itself confluent on open terms. However, we believe that λse still deserves attention because, while offering a new style to work with explicit substitutions, it is able to simulate one step of classical β-reduction, whereas λζ is not. To prove confluence we introduce a generalisation of the interpretation method (cf. Hardin, 1989; Curien et al., 1992) to a technique which uses weak normal forms (instead of strong ones). We consider that this extended method is a useful tool to obtain confluence when strong normalisation of the subcalculus of substitutions is not available. In our case, strong normalisation of the corresponding subcalculus of substitutions se, is still a challenging open problem to the rewrite community, but its weak normalisation is established here via an effective strategy.

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In this paper we consider a type system with a universal type ω where any term (whether open or closed, β-normalising or not) has type ω. We provide this type system with a realisability semantics where an atomic type is interpreted as the set of λ-terms saturated by a certain relation. The variation of the saturation relation gives a number of interpretations to each type. We show the soundness and completeness of our semantics and that for different notions of saturation (based on weak head reduction and normal β-reduction) we obtain the same interpretation for types. Since the presence of ω prevents typability and realisability from coinciding and creates extra difficulties in characterizing the interpretation of a type, we define a class U + of the so-called positive types (where ω can only occur at specific positions). We show that if a term inhabits a positive type, then this term is β-normalisable and reduces to a closed term. In other words, positive types can be used to represent abstract data types. The completeness theorem for U + becomes interesting indeed since it establishes a perfect equivalence between typable terms and terms that inhabit a type. In other words, typability and realisability coincide on U + . We give a number of examples to explain the intuition behind the definition of U + and to show that this class cannot be extended while keeping its desired properties.

This paper starts by setting the ground for a lambda calculus notation that strongly mirrors the two fundamental operations of term construction, namely abstraction and application. In particular, we single out those parts of a term, called items in the paper, that are added during abstraction and application. This item notation proves to be a powerful device for the representation of basic substitution steps, giving rise to different versions of β-reduction including local and global β-reduction. In other words substitution, thanks to the new notation, can be easily formalised as an object language notion rather than remaining a meta language one. Such formalisation will have advantages with respect to various areas including functional application and the partial unfolding of definitions. Moreover our substitution is, we believe, the most general to date. This is shown by the fact that our framework can accommodate most of the known reduction strategies, which range from local to global. Finally, we show how the calculus of substitution of Abadi et al., can be embedded into our calculus. We show moreover that many of the rules of Abadi et al. are easily derivable in our calculus.