Algorithmic games for full ground references

摘要

We present a full classification of decidable and undecidable cases for contextual equivalence in a finitary ML-like language equipped with full ground storage (both integers and reference names can be stored). The simplest undecidable type is $$mathsf {unit}rightarrow mathsf {unit}rightarrow mathsf {unit}$$ unit → unit → unit . At the technical level, our results marry game semantics with automata-theoretic techniques developed to handle infinite alphabets. On the automata-theoretic front, we show decidability of the emptiness problem for register pushdown automata extended with fresh-symbol generation.