Taylor Expansion Finitely Simulates Infinitary β-Reduction
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Originating in Girard's Linear logic, Ehrhard and Regnier's Taylor expansion of λ-terms has been broadly used as a tool to approximate the terms of several variants of the λ-calculus. Many results arise from a Commutation theorem relating the normal form of the Taylor expansion of a term to its Böhm tree. This led us to consider extending this formalism to the infinitary λ-calculus, since the Λ_∞^001 version of this calculus has Böhm trees as normal forms and seems to be the ideal framework to reformulate the Commutation theorem. We give a (co-)inductive presentation of Λ_∞^001. We define a Taylor expansion on this calculus, and state that the infinitary β-reduction can be simulated through this Taylor expansion. The target language is the usual resource calculus, and in particular the resource reduction remains finite, confluent and terminating. Finally, we state the generalised Commutation theorem and use our results to provide simple proofs of some normalisation and confluence properties in the infinitary λ-calculus.
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