The concept of abstract data types (ADTs) has emerged in the last fifteen years or so as one of the major programming design tools, with the emphasis on modular construction of large-scale programe. ADTs provide the means for seperating how data objects may be used from the different ways in which they actually are, or might be, implemented. A foundation for the theory of compputation with ADTs must provide answers to such questions as: What are ADTs and how may they be specified? What does it mean to implement an ADT? How may we construct new ADTs from old ones? What does it mean to compute with ADTs? This paper is devoted to a new and rather general, constructively based approach to these questions.

A constructive characterization is given of the isomorphisms which must hold in all models of the typed lambda calculus with surjective pairing. Using the close relation between closed Cartesian categories and models of these calculi, we also produce a characterization of those isomorphisms which hold in all CCC's. Using the correspondence between these calculi and proofs in intuitionistic positive propositional logic, we thus provide a characterization of equivalent formulae of this logic, where the definition of equivalence of terms depends on having “invertible” proofs between the two terms. Work of Rittri (1989), on types as search keys in program libraries, provides an interesting example of use of these characterizations.