Author name cluster

Pablo Barenbaum

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

5 papers

1 author row

CSL Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Useful Call-by-Value: A Semantic Interpretation via Quantitative Types

Pablo Barenbaum
Delia Kesner
Mariana Milicich

Useful evaluation is an optimised evaluation mechanism for functional programming languages. It relies on representing terms with sharing and imposing a restricted notion of useful substitutions, that intuitively disallows copying subterms that do not contribute to the progress of the computation. In particular, useful call-by-value evaluation optimises the standard call-by-value strategy by preserving its original semantics. This preservation result has been shown by means of syntactical rewriting techniques, difficult to adapt to alternative variants of the calculi at play. In this work, we present the first semantic model of useful call-by-value evaluation through the non-idempotent intersection type system 𝒰. Our first contribution is a characterisation of termination for useful call-by-value evaluation via system 𝒰. That is, a term is typable in system 𝒰 if and only if it terminates in the useful call-by-value strategy. As a second contribution, we show that system 𝒰 provides a quantitative interpretation for useful call-by-value evaluation, offering exact step-count information for program evaluation. Our third contribution is that termination in call-by-value and useful call-by-value are equivalent. This ensures in particular that call-by-value, which is (potentially) erasing, and useful call-by-value, which is non-erasing, are observationally equivalent. Even though the specification of the operational semantics of useful evaluation is highly complex, system 𝒰 is notably simple. As far as we know, system 𝒰 is one of the scarce quantitative type systems capturing exactly the substitution step-count for variables and abstractions in an open call-by-value strategy.

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LPAR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Hybrid Intersection Types for PCF

Pablo Barenbaum
Delia Kesner
Mariana Milicich

Intersection type systems have been independently applied to different evaluation strate- gies, such as call-by-name (CBN) and call-by-value (CBV). These type systems have been then generalized to different subsuming paradigms being able, in particular, to encode CBN and CBV in a unique unifying framework. However, there are no intersection type systems that explicitly enable CBN and CBV to cohabit together, without making use of an encoding into a common target framework. This work proposes an intersection type system for a specific notion of evaluation for PCF, called PCFH. Evaluation in PCFH actually has a hybrid nature, in the sense that CBN and CBV operational behaviors cohabit together. Indeed, PCFH combines a CBV- like behavior for function application with a CBN-like behavior for recursion. This hybrid nature is reflected in the type system, which turns out to be sound and complete with respect to PCFH: not only typability implies normalization, but also the converse holds. Moreover, the type system is quantitative, in the sense that the size of typing derivations provides upper bounds for the length of the reduction sequences to normal form. This first type system is then refined to a tight one, offering exact information regarding the length of normalization sequences. This is the first time that a sound and complete quantitative type system has been designed for a hybrid computational model.

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CSL Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Proofs and Refutations for Intuitionistic and Second-Order Logic

Pablo Barenbaum
Teodoro Freund

The λ^{PRK}-calculus is a typed λ-calculus that exploits the duality between the notions of proof and refutation to provide a computational interpretation for classical propositional logic. In this work, we extend λ^{PRK} to encompass classical second-order logic, by incorporating parametric polymorphism and existential types. The system is shown to enjoy good computational properties, such as type preservation, confluence, and strong normalization, which is established by means of a reducibility argument. We identify a syntactic restriction on proofs that characterizes exactly the intuitionistic fragment of second-order λ^{PRK}, and we study canonicity results.

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CSL Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Reductions in Higher-Order Rewriting and Their Equivalence

Pablo Barenbaum
Eduardo Bonelli

Proof terms are syntactic expressions that represent computations in term rewriting. They were introduced by Meseguer and exploited by van Oostrom and de Vrijer to study equivalence of reductions in (left-linear) first-order term rewriting systems. We study the problem of extending the notion of proof term to higher-order rewriting, which generalizes the first-order setting by allowing terms with binders and higher-order substitution. In previous works that devise proof terms for higher-order rewriting, such as Bruggink’s, it has been noted that the challenge lies in reconciling composition of proof terms and higher-order substitution (β-equivalence). This led Bruggink to reject "nested" composition, other than at the outermost level. In this paper, we propose a notion of higher-order proof term we dub rewrites that supports nested composition. We then define two notions of equivalence on rewrites, namely permutation equivalence and projection equivalence, and show that they coincide.

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FSCD Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Two Decreasing Measures for Simply Typed λ-Terms

Pablo Barenbaum
Cristian Sottile

This paper defines two decreasing measures for terms of the simply typed λ-calculus, called the 𝒲-measure and the 𝒯^{𝐦}-measure. A decreasing measure is a function that maps each typable λ-term to an element of a well-founded ordering, in such a way that contracting any β-redex decreases the value of the function, entailing strong normalization. Both measures are defined constructively, relying on an auxiliary calculus, a non-erasing variant of the λ-calculus. In this system, dubbed the λ^{𝐦}-calculus, each β-step creates a "wrapper" containing a copy of the argument that cannot be erased and cannot interact with the context in any other way. Both measures rely crucially on the observation, known to Turing and Prawitz, that contracting a redex cannot create redexes of higher degree, where the degree of a redex is defined as the height of the type of its λ-abstraction. The 𝒲-measure maps each λ-term to a natural number, and it is obtained by evaluating the term in the λ^{𝐦}-calculus and counting the number of remaining wrappers. The 𝒯^{𝐦}-measure maps each λ-term to a structure of nested multisets, where the nesting depth is proportional to the maximum redex degree.

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