Coinductive Equivalences and Metrics for Higher-order Languages with Algebraic Effects

Abstract

This dissertation investigates notions of program equivalence and metric for higher-order sequential languages with algebraic effects. Computational effects are those aspects of computation that involve forms of interaction with the environment. Due to such an interactive behaviour, reasoning about effectful programs is well-known to be hard. This is especially true for higher-order effectful languages, where programs can be passed as input to, and returned as output by other programs, as well as perform side-effects. Additionally, when dealing with effectful languages, program equivalence is oftentimes too coarse, not allowing, for instance, to quantify the observable differences between programs. A natural way to overcome this problem is to re ne the notion of a program equivalence into the one of a program distance or program metric, this way allowing for a finer, quantitative analysis of program behaviour. A proper account of program distance, however, requires a more sophisticated theory than program equivalence, both conceptually and mathematically. This often makes the study of program distance way more di cult than the corresponding study of program equivalence.