English

Representing Guardedness in Call-by-Value and Guarded Parametrized Monads

Logic in Computer Science 2026-03-11 v4

Abstract

Like the notion of computation via (strong) monads serves to classify various flavours of impurity, including exceptions, non-determinism, probability, local and global store, the notion of guardedness classifies well-behavedness of cycles in various settings. In its most general form, the guardedness discipline applies to general symmetric monoidal categories and further specializes to Cartesian and co-Cartesian categories, where it governs guarded recursion and guarded iteration, respectively. Here, even more specifically, we deal with the semantics of call-by-value guarded iteration. It was shown by Levy, Power and Thielecke that call-by-value languages can be generally interpreted in Freyd categories, but in order to represent effectful function spaces, such a category must canonically arise from a strong monad. We generalize this fact by showing that representing guarded effectful function spaces calls for certain parameterized monads (in the sense of Uustalu). This provides a description of guardedness as an intrinsic categorical property of programs, complementing the existing description of guardedness as a predicate on a category.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.00704,
  title  = {Representing Guardedness in Call-by-Value and Guarded Parametrized Monads},
  author = {Sergey Goncharov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.00704},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:06:13.752Z