Full Abstraction for PCF

traction for PCF1 Samson.Abramsky2 University of Edinburgh and Radha Jagadeesan3 Loyola University Chicago and Pasquale Malacaria4 Queen Mary and Westfield College An intensional model for the programming language PCF is described, in which the types of PCF are interpreted by games, and the terms by certain "history-free" strategies. This model is shown to capture definability in PCF. More precisely, every compact strategy in the model is definable in a certain simple extension of PCF. We then introduce an intrinsic preorder on strategies, and show that it satisfies some striking properties, such that the intrinsic preorder on function types coincides with the pointwise pree then obtain an order-extensional fully abstract model of PCF by quotienting the intensional model by the intrinsic preorder. This is the first syntax-independent description of the fully abstract model for PCF. (Hyland and Ong have obtained very similar results by a somewhat different route, independently...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: TACS
• Authors: Samson Abramsky, Pasquale Malacaria, Radha Jagadeesan
• Keywords: Intensional Model, Model, Programming Language Pcf, Software Engineering, TACS 1994