A diagrammatic approach to symmetric lenses

Abstract

Lenses are a mathematical structure for maintaining consistency between a pair of systems. In their ongoing research program, Johnson and Rosebrugh have sought to unify the treatment of symmetric lenses with spans of asymmetric lenses. This paper presents a diagrammatic approach to symmetric lenses between categories, through representing the propagation operations with Mealy morphisms. The central result of this paper is to demonstrate that the bicategory of symmetric lenses is locally adjoint to the bicategory of spans of asymmetric lenses, through constructing an explicit adjoint triple between the hom-categories.