Games and Full Abstraction for a Functional Metalanguage with Recursive Types (Distinguished Dissertations)

This book is a minor revision of the thesis submitted in August 1996; no major changes have been made. However, I would like to take this opportunity to mention that since the thesis was written, discoveries have been made which would allow a substantial simplification and strengthening of the results in Chapters 3 and 6. In particular, it is now possible to model sums correctly in the category I as well as in £, which means that the definability results of Chapter 6 can be stated and proved at the intensional level, making them simpler and much closer in spirit to the original proofs of Abramsky, Jagadeesan, Malacaria, Hyland, Ong and Nickau [10,61,79]. This also leads quite straightforwardly to an understanding of call-by-value languages. Details of these improvements can be found in [14,73]. It is also worth mentioning that progress has been made on some of the topics suggested for future research in Chapter 7. In particular, fully abstract models have been found for various kinds of languages with local variables [8,13-16], and a fully complete games model of the polymorphic language System F has been constructed by Hughes [59]. Guy McCusker February 1998 Acknowledgements First of all, I must thank my supervisor, Samson Abramsky. It was he who first introduced me to game semantics and suggested avenues of research in the area; this book would certainly not exist were it not for him.