Technical Report: Initial Algebra Semantics in Matching Logic Xiaohong Chen1, Dorel Lucanu2, and Grigore Ro¸su1 1University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, USA 2Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Ia¸si,Romania xc3@illinois,
[email protected],
[email protected] July 24, 2020 Abstract Matching logic is a unifying foundational logic for defining formal programming language semantics, which adopts a minimalist design with few primitive constructs that are enough to express all properties within a variety of logical systems, including FOL, separation logic, (dependent) type systems, modal µ-logic, and more. In this paper, we consider initial algebra semantics and show how to capture it by matching logic specifications. Formally, given an algebraic specification E that defines a set of sorts (of data) and a set of operations whose behaviors are defined by a set of equational axioms, we define a corresponding matching logic specification, denoted INITIALALGEBRA(E), whose models are exactly the initial algebras of E. Thus, we reduce initial E-algebra semantics to the matching logic specifications INITIALALGEBRA(E), and reduce extrinsic initial E-algebra reasoning, which includes inductive reasoning, to generic, intrinsic matching logic reasoning. 1 Introduction Initial algebra semantics is a main approach to formal programming language semantics based on algebraic specifications and their initial models. It originated in the 1970s, when algebraic techniques started to be applied to specify basic data types such as lists, trees, stacks, etc. The original paper on initial algebra semantics [Goguen et al., 1977] reviewed various existing algebraic specification techniques and showed that they were all initial models, making the concept of initiality explicit for the first time in formal language semantics.