Join inverse categories and reversible recursion

Abstract Recently, a number of reversible functional programming languages have been proposed. Common to several of these is the assumption of totality, a property that is not necessarily desirable, and certainly not required in order to guarantee reversibility. In a categorical setting, however, faithfully capturing partiality requires handling it as additional structure. Recently, Giles studied inverse categories as a model of partial reversible (functional) programming. In this paper, we show how additionally assuming the existence of countable joins on such inverse categories leads to a number of properties that are desirable when modeling reversible functional programming, notably morphism schemes for reversible recursion, a †-trace, and algebraic ω -compactness. This gives a categorical account of reversible recursion, and, for the latter, provides an answer to the problem posed by Giles regarding the formulation of recursive data types at the inverse category level.