Confluence properties of weak and strong calculi of explicit substitutions

Projet CHLOE, Projet PARACategorical combinators and more recently ls-calculus have been introduced to provide an explicit treatments of substitutions in the l-calculus. We reintroduce here the ingredients of these calculi in a self-contained and stepwise way, with a special emphasis on confluence properties. The main new results of the paper w.r.t. are the following : - we present a confluent weak calculus of substitutions, where no variable clashes can be feared - we solve a conjecture : ls-calculus is not confluent (it is confluent on ground terms only). This unfortunate result is "repaired" by presenting a confluent version of ls-calculus, named the lEnv-calculus called here the confluent ls-calculus

A Calculus of Substitutions for Incomplete-Proof Representation in Type Theory

Projet COQIn the framework of intuitionnistic logic and type theory, the concepts of «propositions» and «types» are identified. This principle is known as the Curry-Howard isomorphism, and it is at the base of mathematical formalisms where proofs are represented as typed lambda-terms. In order to see the process of proof construction as an incremental process of term construction, it is necessary to extend the lambda-calculus with new operators. First, we consider typed meta-variables to represent the parts of a proof that are under construction, and second, we make explicit the substitution mechanism in order to deal with capture of variables that are bound in terms containing meta-variables. Unfortunately, the theory of explicit substitution calculi with typed meta-variables is more complex than that of lambda-calculus. And worse, in general they do not share the same properties, notably with respect to confluence and strong normalization. A contribution of this thesis is to show that the properties of confluence and strong normalization are not incompatible with explicit substitution calculi. This thesis also proposes a calculus with explicit substitutions and typed meta-variables for dependent type systems, in particular for the Calculus of Constructions, which allows incomplete proof-terms to be represented. For these type systems, we prove the main typing properties: Type Uniqueness, Subject Reduction, Weak Normalization, Confluence and Typing Decidability. Finally, we give an application of this formalism to proof synthesis. The proposed method merges a procedure for term enumeration with a technique of higher-order unification via explicit substitutions where unification variables are coded as meta-variables

A Theory of Explicit Substitutions with Safe and Full Composition

Many different systems with explicit substitutions have been proposed to implement a large class of higher-order languages. Motivations and challenges that guided the development of such calculi in functional frameworks are surveyed in the first part of this paper. Then, very simple technology in named variable-style notation is used to establish a theory of explicit substitutions for the lambda-calculus which enjoys a whole set of useful properties such as full composition, simulation of one-step beta-reduction, preservation of beta-strong normalisation, strong normalisation of typed terms and confluence on metaterms. Normalisation of related calculi is also discussed.Comment: 29 pages Special Issue: Selected Papers of the Conference "International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming 2008" edited by Giuseppe Castagna and Igor Walukiewic

Labelled Lambda-calculi with Explicit Copy and Erase

We present two rewriting systems that define labelled explicit substitution lambda-calculi. Our work is motivated by the close correspondence between Levy's labelled lambda-calculus and paths in proof-nets, which played an important role in the understanding of the Geometry of Interaction. The structure of the labels in Levy's labelled lambda-calculus relates to the multiplicative information of paths; the novelty of our work is that we design labelled explicit substitution calculi that also keep track of exponential information present in call-by-value and call-by-name translations of the lambda-calculus into linear logic proof-nets

An Abstract Factorization Theorem for Explicit Substitutions

We study a simple form of standardization, here called factorization, for explicit substitutions calculi, i.e. lambda-calculi where beta-reduction is decomposed in various rules. These calculi, despite being non-terminating and non-orthogonal, have a key feature: each rule terminates when considered separately. It is well-known that the study of rewriting properties simplifies in presence of termination (e.g. confluence reduces to local confluence). This remark is exploited to develop an abstract theorem deducing factorization from some axioms on local diagrams. The axioms are simple and easy to check, in particular they do not mention residuals. The abstract theorem is then applied to some explicit substitution calculi related to Proof-Nets. We show how to recover standardization by levels, we model both call-by-name and call-by-value calculi and we characterize linear head reduction via a factorization theorem for a linear calculus of substitutions

Metaconfluence of Calculi with Explicit Substitutions at a Distance

Confluence is a key property of rewriting calculi that guarantees uniqueness of normal-forms when they exist. Metaconfluence is even more general, and guarantees confluence on open/meta terms, i.e. terms with holes, called metavariables that can be filled up with other (open/meta) terms. The difficulty to deal with open terms comes from the fact that the structure of metaterms is only partially known, so that some reduction rules became blocked by the metavariables. In this work, we establish metaconfluence for a family of calculi with explicit substitutions (ES) that enjoy preservation of strong-normalization (PSN) and that act at a distance. For that, we first extend the notion of reduction on metaterms in such a way that explicit substitutions are never structurally moved, i.e. they also act at a distance on metaterms. The resulting reduction relations are still rewriting systems, i.e. they do not include equational axioms, thus providing for the first time an interesting family of lambda-calculi with explicit substitutions that enjoy both PSN and metaconfluence without requiring sophisticated notions of reduction modulo a set of equations

Dual-Context Calculi for Modal Logic

We present natural deduction systems and associated modal lambda calculi for the necessity fragments of the normal modal logics K, T, K4, GL and S4. These systems are in the dual-context style: they feature two distinct zones of assumptions, one of which can be thought as modal, and the other as intuitionistic. We show that these calculi have their roots in in sequent calculi. We then investigate their metatheory, equip them with a confluent and strongly normalizing notion of reduction, and show that they coincide with the usual Hilbert systems up to provability. Finally, we investigate a categorical semantics which interprets the modality as a product-preserving functor.Comment: Full version of article previously presented at LICS 2017 (see arXiv:1602.04860v4 or doi: 10.1109/LICS.2017.8005089