A Concrete Representation of Observational Equivalence for PCF

Abstract

The full abstraction result for PCF using game semantics requires one to identify all innocent strategies that are innocently indistinguishable. This involves a quantification over all innocent tests, cf. quantification over all innocent contexts. Here we present a representation of innocent strategies that equates innocently indistinguishable ones, yielding a representation of PCF terms that equates precisely those terms that are observational equivalent.