Steve Vickers has bounced me into replying to the questions about locales that Rafael Borowiecki (aka Hasse Riemann) asked, even though I had said that I would do so when I was ready with some other comments on that subject. The following also includes the answer to a question that I myself raised last year, which has further consequences for the appropriateness of locale theory as an account of general topology, but I am not going to say what these are until I am actually ready. In my "autobiography", I had said,

Another [problem] is how to embed the category of locales in a CCC WITHOUT using illegitimate presheaves (Vickers and Townsend) or the axiom of collection (Heckmann). When I wrote the original version of this posting a couple of weeks back, I thought I could solve this one. I am still hopeful, but it turns out to be a powerful question, cf Ronnie's (2) above.

Rafael asked me,

Why should presheaves be illegitimate?

I am not saying that presheaves in general are illegitimate in the plain English sense of the word. The work that I was referring to uses the category of all functors from the opposite of the category of locales to the category of sets. Since the category of locales is "large", this functor-category is super-large or "illegitimate", where the quoted words have a technical meaning. As Steve Vickers has already explained, he goes to some trouble to avoid the problems, essentially by exploring only a tiny part of the presheaf category. He really only uses the exponentials Sigma^X of locales, which are the functors Loc(-xX,Sigma). The rest of the comments concern the paper @article{HeckmannR:carcec, title={A Cartesian Closed Extension of the Category of Locales}, author={Heckmann, Reinhold}, journal={Mathematical Structures in Computer Science}, year={2006}, volume={16}, pages={231--253}} which was inspired by Dana Scott's equilogical space construction. However, Reinhold's "equivalence relations" are what the presheaf category provides. So a relation on a single locale requires data from every object in the category. (The details are rather complicated, and I don't recall them exactly at the moment.) The collection of morphisms between two equilocales is defined as the image of a class in a set.

Then, i suppose the axiom of collection is valid at least in the CCC.

No. The axiom of collection says roughly that, given a function from a class to a set, its image is a set. This is quite a strong axiom of set theory, and is certainly not valid in something as logically weak as a CCC.

But what is so bad about the axiom of collection in this case?

The vast majority of ordinary mathematics can be done in an elementary topos with a natural number object, maybe together with assumptions of excluded middle or the axiom of choice. This is roughly but not quite equivalent to Zermelo's set theory -- NOT ZFC, which adds the substantially more powerful axiom-scheme of replacement. Rather than using sledgehammers (adding more and more powerful axioms), most categorists would prefer to re-examine the problem to look for more delicate ways of doing things. On a different aspect of locale theory, I asked on 22 July 2008,

Where can I find a published proof that if X --->> Y is a (not necessarily regular) epi of locales then so is X x Z --->> Y x Z for any locale Z? NB (I know that) this is not true for general pullbacks of locales!

Peter Johnstone told me, essentially, that I was assuming excluded middle, in the form that every locale is open (as he would say) or overt (using my word). In fact, the answer is negative even with excluded middle, as Till Plewe pointed out to me. (Till no longer studies categories or locales, but is still doing academic research in Japan, or at least was last year when I was in touch with him.) The (basis of the) counterexample that Till pointed out is described in Peter's book (Stone Spaces) in section II 2.14. It is the locale QE of rationals with the Euclidean topology, that is, the frame of open subsets of the reals, quotiented by their effect on the rationals, so for example (3,pi)v(pi,4) = (3,4) in QE since pi is irrational. I also write QD for the rationals with the discrete topology, so QD is homeomorphic to N. The point is that QE has enough points, indeed QD-->>QE is epi, but QExQE doesn't. This means that QDxQE --> QExQE is not epi. Paul [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]