Quantaloids for concurrency (Q5947271)

This article considers how S. Abramsky's interaction categories [\textit{S. Abramsky}, \textit{S. J. Gay} and \textit{R. Nagarajan}, ``Interaction categories and the foundation of typed concurrent programming'', in: Deductive program design, 35-115 (1996; Zbl 0842.00044)], can be usefully viewed as quantaloids. Quantaloids are categories enriched in \({\mathcal S} {\mathcal L}\), the autonomous category of sup-lattices [see the reviewer's book, \textit{K. I. Rosenthal}, ``The theory of quantaloids'', Pitman Res. Notes Math. 348 (1996; Zbl 0845.18003)]. If one considers the monad \(T\) on \({\mathcal B} {\mathcal Q}ant\), the category of quantaloids with byproducts, induced by the free quantaloid with byproducts construction, then Abramsky's category \({\mathcal S} {\mathcal P}roc\) of synchronous processes is the largest fixpoint of \(T\). This article shows how this largest fixpoint can be obtained by the standard limit construction. The first section of the paper develops the result that any semisimple quantaloid is equivalent to the quantaloid of matrices \({\mathcal M}({ \mathcal Q})\) for a prime quantaloid \({\mathcal Q}\) and the second section utilizes this to obtain the main result described above.