RPO, Second-order Contexts, and λ-calculus

We apply Leifer-Milner RPO approach to the λ-calculus, endowed with lazy and call by value reduction strategies. We show that, contrary to process calculi, one can deal directly with the λ-calculus syntax and apply Leifer-Milner technique to a category of contexts, provided that we work in the framework of weak bisimilarities. However, even in the case of the transition system with minimal contexts, the resulting bisimilarity is infinitely branching, due to the fact that, in standard context categories, parametric rules such as β can be represented only by infinitely many ground rules. To overcome this problem, we introduce the general notion of second-order context category. We show that, by carrying out the RPO construction in this setting, the lazy (call by value) observational equivalence can be captured as a weak bisimilarity equivalence on a finitely branching transition system. This result is achieved by considering an encoding of λ-calculus in Combinatory Logic.