Functorial semantics of first-order views.pdfVIP

Theoretical Computer Science 656 (2016) 46–59 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Theoretical Computer Science /locate/tcs Functorial semantics of ?rst-order views Ra?zvan Diaconescu Simion Stoilow Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, Romania article info Article history: Received 16 March 2015 Received in revised form 30 August 2016 Accepted 14 September 2016 Available online 28 September 2016 Communicated by D. Sannella Keywords: Algebraic speci?cations Parameterised speci?cations Views abstract We provide a precise mathematical de?nition for ?rst-order views used in parameterised speci?cations and we also provide a dual semantics for them that captures both their syntactic and model theoretic effects. We show that this semantics is functorial. Parameter instantiation is de?ned here as a (special kind of) pushout in the category of views; moreover the corresponding pushout squares are shown to enjoy a crucial model amalgamation property that ensures the consistency of the parameter instantiation process. ? 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction One of the most important techniques for building large logic-based formal speci?cations is that of parameterisation. One of the major ?avours of parameterisation is the so-called pushout-style parameterisation. This terminology re?ects the use of the pushout concept from category theory in the instantiations of parameters. This idea originates from work on Clear [4] and constitutes the basis of parameterised speci?cation for the whole OBJ family of languages (i.e. OBJ3 [20], CafeOBJ [12], etc.) but also for ACT TWO [16], CASL [28], etc. Moreover pushout-style parameterisation appears also in less algebraic and even programming contexts, examples including ML [21,26,24] and other languages in?uenced by it (such as Elf [22], etc.). Following recent literature such as [11], a parametrised speci?cation is a speci?cation morphism P → SP such that its underlying signature morphism is an inclus