Productive coprogramming with guarded recursion

Abstract

Total functional programming offers the beguiling vision that, just by virtue of the compiler accepting a program, we are guaranteed that it will always terminate. In the case of programs that are not intended to terminate, e.g., servers, we are guaranteed that programs will always be productive. Productivity means that, even if a program generates an infinite amount of data, each piece will be generated in finite time. The theoretical underpinning for productive programming with infinite output is provided by the category theoretic notion of final coalgebras. Hence, we speak of coprogramming with non-well-founded codata, as a dual to programming with well-founded data like finite lists and trees.