Standardization in resource lambda-calculus

Abstract

The resource calculus is an extension of the lambda-calculus allowing to model resource consumption. It is intrinsically non-deterministic and has two general notions of reduction – one parallel, preserving all the possible results as a formal sum, and one non-deterministic, performing an exclusive choice at every step. We prove that the non-deterministic reduction enjoys a notion of standardization, which is the natural extension with respect to the similar one in classical lambda-calculus. The full parallel reduction only enjoys a weaker notion of standardization instead. The result allows an operational characterization of may-solvability, which has been introduced and already characterized (from the syntactical and logical points of view) by Pagani and Ronchi Della Rocca.