25/01/2007
Thomas Streicher (Technische Universität Darmstadt)
A Universal Model for an Infinitary Lambda Calculus in OSA

(joint work with Tobias Loew)

The category OSA (of Observably Sequential Algorithms) was introduced in the early 1990ies by Cartwright, Curien and Felleisen and shown to give rise to a fully abstract model for SPCF.

We show that this model is also universal for the computable part of OSA because every type appears as SPCF definable retract of U = N --> N and all computable elements of U can be expressed in SPCF.

Moreover, when performing the D_\infty construction of D.Scott within OSA and starting from Sierpinski space O (containing only \bot and \top) then we get a minimal D in OSA which is isomorphic to all \omega-ary functions from D to O. We show that this structure gives rise to a universal model for an infinitary typed \lambda-calculus CPS_\infty (infinitary CPS target language) with an error element \top and infinitary application and abstraction.

Using this one gets a conceptual proof of a theorem of Laird saying that for simple types OSA is the quotient of innocent games modulo observational equivalence.