Full abstraction for expressiveness: history, myths and facts
Daniele Gorla, Uwe Nestmann · Mathematical Structures in Computer Science · 2014
What does it mean that an encoding is fully abstract? What does itnotmean? In this position paper, we want to help the reader to evaluate the real benefits of using such a notion when studying the expressiveness of programming languages. Several examples and counterexamples are given. In some cases, we work at a very abstract level; in other cases, we give concrete samples taken from the field of process calculi, where the theory of expressiveness has been mostly developed in the last years.