Copyright Information
The documents distributed by this server have been provided by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of
scholarly and technical work on a noncommercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other
copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying
this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without
the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
Sensoria Bibliography Site Symmetries, Local Names and Dynamic (De)-allocation of Names
Vincenzo Ciancia, Ugo Montanari
abstract:
The semantics of \emph{name-passing} calculi is often defined employing
coalgebraic models over presheaf categories. This elegant theory lacks
finiteness properties, hence it is not apt to implementation. Coalgebras
over named sets, called \emph{history-dependent automata}, are better
suited for the purpose due to locality of names. A theory of behavioural
functors for named sets is still lacking: the semantics of each language
has been given in an \emph{ad-hoc} way, and algorithms were implemented
only for the $\pi$-calculus. Existence of the final coalgebra for
the $\pi$-calculus was never proved. We introduce a language of \emph{accessible} functors to specify history-dependent automata in a modular way,
leading to a clean formulation and a generalisation of previous results,
and to the proof of existence of a final coalgebra in a wide range
of cases.