Effectful program distancing

Abstract

Semantics is traditionally concerned with program equivalence, in which all pairs of programs which are not equivalent are treated the same, and simply dubbed as incomparable. In recent years, various forms of program metrics have been introduced such that the distance between non-equivalent programs is measured as an element of an appropriate quantale. By letting the underlying quantale vary as the type of the compared programs become more complex, the recently introduced framework of differential logical relations allows for a new contextual form of reasoning. In this paper, we show that all this can be generalised to effectful higher-order programs, in which not only the values , but also the effects computations produce can be appropriately distanced in a principled way. We show that the resulting framework is flexible, allowing various forms of effects to be handled, and that it provides compact and informative judgments about program differences.