Partiality and Recursion in Interactive Theorem Provers - An Overview

To appearInternational audienceThe use of interactive theorem provers to establish the correctness of critical parts of a software development or for formalising mathematics is becoming more common and feasible in practice. However, most mature theorem provers lack a direct treatment of partial and general recursive functions; overcoming this weakness has been the objective of intensive research during the last decades. In this article, we review many techniques that have been proposed in the literature to simplify the formalisation of partial and general recursive functions in interactive theorem provers. Moreover, we classify the techniques according to their theoretical basis and their practical use. This uniform presentation of the different techniques facilitates the comparison and highlights their commonalities and differences, as well as their relative advantages and limitations. We focus on theorem provers based on constructive type theory (in particular, Agda and Coq) and higher-order logic (in particular Isabelle/HOL). Other systems and logics are covered to a certain extent, but not exhaustively. In addition to the description of the techniques, we also demonstrate tools which facilitate working with the problematic functions in particular theorem provers

Probabilistic Termination by Monadic Affine Sized Typing

International audienceWe introduce a system of monadic affine sized types, which substantially generalise usual sized types, and allows this way to capture probabilistic higher-order programs which terminate almost surely. Going beyond plain, strong normalisation without losing soundness turns out to be a hard task, which cannot be accomplished without a richer, quantitative notion of types, but also without imposing some affinity constraints. The proposed type system is powerful enough to type classic examples of probabilistically terminating programs such as random walks. The way typable programs are proved to be almost surely terminating is based on reducibility, but requires a substantial adaptation of the technique

Termination of Open Higher-Order Programs

We study the problem of proving termination of open, higher-order programs with recursive functions and datatypes. We identify a new point in the design space of solutions, with an appealing trade-off between simplicity of specification, modularity, and amenability to automation. Specifically, we consider termination of open expressions in the presence of higher-order, recursive functions, and introduce a new notion of termination that is conditioned on the termination of the callbacks made by the expressions. For closed expressions our definition coincides with the traditional definition of termination. We derive sound proof obligations for establishing termination modulo callbacks, and develop a modular approach for verifying the obligations. Our approach is novel in three aspects. (a) It allows users to express properties about the environment in the form of higher-order contracts. (b) It establishes properties on the creation sites of closures instead of application sites and does not require knowing the targets of applications. (c) It uses a modular reasoning where termination (modulo callbacks) is verified for each function independently and then composed to check termination of their callers. We present the results of evaluating our approach on benchmarks comprising more than 10K lines of functional Scala code. The results show that our approach, when combined with a safety verifier, established both termination and safety of complex algorithms and data structures that are beyond the reach of state-of-the-art techniques. For example, it verifies Okasaki's scheduling-based data structures and lazy trees in under a few seconds

On Induction, Coinduction and Equality in Martin-L\uf6f and Homotopy Type Theory

Martin L\uf6f Type Theory, having put computation at the center of logicalreasoning, has been shown to be an effective foundation for proof assistants,with applications both in computer science and constructive mathematics. Oneambition though is for MLTT to also double as a practical general purposeprogramming language. Datatypes in type theory come with an induction orcoinduction principle which gives a precise and concise specification of theirinterface. However, such principles can interfere with how we would like toexpress our programs. In this thesis, we investigate more flexible alternativesto direct uses of the (co)induction principles.As a first contribution, we consider the n-truncation of a type in Homo-topy Type Theory. We derive in HoTT an eliminator into (n+1)-truncatedtypes instead of n-truncated ones, assuming extra conditions on the underlyingfunction.As a second contribution, we improve on type-based criteria for terminationand productivity. By augmenting the types with well-foundedness information,such criteria allow function definitions in a style closer to general recursion.We consider two criteria: guarded types, and sized types.Guarded types introduce a modality ”later” to guard the availability ofrecursive calls provided by a general fixed-point combinator. In Guarded Cu-bical Type Theory we equip the fixed-point combinator with a propositionalequality to its one-step unfolding, instead of a definitional equality that wouldbreak normalization. The notion of path from Cubical Type Theory allows usto do so without losing canonicity or decidability of conversion.Sized types, on the other hand, explicitly index datatypes with size boundson the height or depth of their elements. The sizes however can get in theway of the reasoning principles we expect. Our approach is to introduce newquantifiers for ”irrelevant” size quantification. We present a type theory withparametric quantifiers where irrelevance arises as a “free theorem”. We alsodevelop a conversion checking algorithm for a more specific theory where thenew quantifiers are restricted to sizes.Finally, our third contribution is about the operational semantics of typetheory. For the extensions above we would like to devise a practical conversionchecking algorithm suitable for integration into a proof assistant. We formal-ized the correctness of such an algorithm for a small but challenging corecalculus, proving that conversion is decidable. We expect this development toform a good basis to verify more complex theories.The ideas discussed in this thesis are already influencing the developmentof Agda, a proof assistant based on type theory