Taylor subsumes Scott, Berry, Kahn and Plotkin

Abstract

The speculative ambition of replacing the old theory of program approximation based on syntactic continuity with the theory of resource consumption based on Taylor expansion and originating from the differential λ-calculus is nowadays at hand. Using this resource sensitive theory, we provide simple proofs of important results in λ-calculus that are usually demonstrated by exploiting Scott’s continuity, Berry’s stability or Kahn and Plotkin’s sequentiality theory. A paradigmatic example is given by the Perpendicular Lines Lemma for the Böhm tree semantics, which is proved here simply by induction, but relying on the main properties of resource approximants: strong normalization, confluence and linearity.