Well-founded coalgebras, revisited

Theoretical models of recursion schemes have been well studied under the names well-founded coalgebras, recursive coalgebras, corecursive algebras and Elgot algebras. Much of this work focuses on conditions ensuring unique or canonical solutions, e.g. when the coalgebra is well founded. If the coalgebra is not well founded, then there can be multiple solutions. The standard semantics of recursive programs gives a particular solution, typically the least fixpoint of a certain monotone map on a domain whose least element is the totally undefined function; but this solution may not be the desired one. We have recently proposed programming language constructs to allow the specification of alternative solutions and methods to compute them. We have implemented these new constructs as an extension of OCaml. In this paper, we prove some theoretical results characterizing well-founded coalgebras, along with several examples for which this extension is useful. We also give several examples that are not well founded but still have a desired solution. In each case, the function would diverge under the standard semantics of recursion, but can be specified and computed with the programming language constructs we have proposed.