Recursion and Corecursion Have the Same Equational Logic

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the equational logic of corecursion, that is of definitions involving final coalgebra maps. The framework for our study is iteration theories (cf. e.g. [1,2]), recently reintroduced as models of the FLR0 fragment of the Formal Language of Recursion [5–7]. We present a new class of iteration theories derived from final coalgebras. This allows us to reason with a number of types of fixed-point equations which heretofore seemed to require to metric or order-theoretic ideas. All of the work can be done using finality properties and equational reasoning.Having a semantics, we obtain the following completeness result: the equations involving fixed-point terms which are valid for final coalgebra interpretations are exactly those valid in a number of contexts pertaining to recursion. For example, they coincide with the equations valid for least-fixed point recursion on cpo's.