Effectful Normal Form Bisimulation

Abstract

Normal form bisimulation, also known as open bisimulation, is a coinductive technique for higher-order program equivalence in which programs are compared by looking at their essentially infinitary tree-like normal forms, i.e. at their Böhm or Lévy-Longo trees. The technique has been shown to be useful not only when proving metatheorems about $$\lambda $$ -calculi and their semantics, but also when looking at concrete examples of terms. In this paper, we show that there is a way to generalise normal form bisimulation to calculi with algebraic effects, à la Plotkin and Power. We show that some mild conditions on monads and relators, which have already been shown to guarantee effectful applicative bisimilarity to be a congruence relation, are enough to prove that the obtained notion of bisimilarity, which we call effectful normal form bisimilarity, is a congruence relation, and thus sound for contextual equivalence. Additionally, contrary to applicative bisimilarity, normal form bisimilarity allows for enhancements of the bisimulation proof method, hence proving a powerful reasoning principle for effectful programming languages.