Effectful Mealy Machines: Bisimulation and Trace

Abstract: We introduce effectful Mealy machines - a general notion of Mealy machine with global effects - and give them semantics in terms of both bisimilarity and traces. Bisimilarity of effectful Mealy machines is characterized syntactically, via free uniform feedback. Traces of effectful Mealy machines are given a novel semantic coinductive universe in terms of effectful streams. We prove that this framework generalizes standard causal processes and captures existing flavours of Mealy machine, bisimilarity, and trace.