Profinite trees, through monads and the lambda-calculus

Abstract: In its simplest form, the theory of regular languages is the study of sets of finite words recognized by finite monoids. The finiteness condition on monoids gives rise to a topological space whose points, called profinite words, encode the limiting behavior of words with respect to finite monoids. Yet, some aspects of the theory of regular languages are not particular to monoids and can be described in a general setting. On the one hand, Boja\'{n}czyk has shown how to use monads to generalize the theory of regular languages and has given an abstract definition of the free profinite structure, defined by codensity, given a fixed monad and a notion of finite structure. On the other hand, Salvati has introduced the notion of language of $\lambda$-terms, using denotational semantics, which generalizes the case of words and trees through the Church encoding. In recent work, the author and collaborators defined the notion of profinite $\lambda$-term using semantics in finite sets and functions, which extend the Church encoding to profinite words. In this article, we prove that these two generalizations, based on monads and denotational semantics, coincide in the case of trees. To do so, we consider the monad of abstract clones which, when applied to a ranked alphabet, gives the associated clone of ranked trees. This induces a notion of free profinite clone, and hence of profinite trees. The main contribution is a categorical proof that the free profinite clone on a ranked alphabet is isomorphic, as a Stone-enriched clone, to the clone of profinite $\lambda$-terms of Church type. Moreover, we also prove a parametricity theorem on families of semantic elements which provides another equivalent formulation of profinite trees in terms of Reynolds parametricity.