A Coinduction Principle for Recursive Data Types Based on Bisimulation

Abstract

The concept of bisimulation from concurrency theory is used to reason about recursively defined data types. From two strong-extensionality theorems stating that the equality (resp. inequality) relation is maximal among all bisimulations, a proof principle for the final coalgebra of an endofunctor on a category of data types (resp. domains) is obtained. As an application of the theory developed, an internal full abstraction result (in the sense of S. Abramsky and C.-H. L. Ong [Inform. and Comput. 105, 159-267 (1993)] for the canonical model of the untyped call-by-value λ-calculus is proved. Also, the operational notion of bisimulation and the denotational notion of final semantics are related by means of conditions under which both coincide. © 1996 Academic Press, Inc.