Coalgebraic Monads

This paper introduces coalgebraic monads as a unified model of term algebras covering fundamental examples such as initial algebras, final coalgebras, rational terms and term graphs. We develop a general method for obtaining finitary coalgebraic monads which allows us to generalise the notion of rational term and term graph to categories other than Set. As an application we sketch part of the correctness of the the term graph implementation of functional programming languages.