Elaborating Inductive Definitions

We present an elaboration of inductive definitions down to a universe of datatypes. The universe of datatypes is an internal presentation of strictly positive families within type theory. By elaborating an inductive definition -- a syntactic artifact -- to its code -- its semantics -- we obtain an internalized account of inductives inside the type theory itself: we claim that reasoning about inductive definitions could be carried in the type theory, not in the meta-theory as it is usually the case. Besides, we give a formal specification of that elaboration process. It is therefore amenable to formal reasoning too. We prove the soundness of our translation and hint at its correctness with respect to Coq's Inductive definitions. The practical benefits of this approach are numerous. For the type theorist, this is a small step toward bootstrapping, ie. implementing the inductive fragment in the type theory itself. For the programmer, this means better support for generic programming: we shall present a lightweight deriving mechanism, entirely definable by the programmer and therefore not requiring any extension to the type theory.Comment: 32 pages, technical repor

On the strength of proof-irrelevant type theories

We present a type theory with some proof-irrelevance built into the conversion rule. We argue that this feature is useful when type theory is used as the logical formalism underlying a theorem prover. We also show a close relation with the subset types of the theory of PVS. We show that in these theories, because of the additional extentionality, the axiom of choice implies the decidability of equality, that is, almost classical logic. Finally we describe a simple set-theoretic semantics.Comment: 20 pages, Logical Methods in Computer Science, Long version of IJCAR 2006 pape

A deep embedding of parametric polymorphism in Coq

We describe a deep embedding of System F inside Coq, along with a denotational semantics that supports reasoning using Reynolds parametricity. The denotations of System F types are given exactly by objects of sort Set in Coq, and the relations used to formalise Reynolds parametricity are Coq predicates with values in Prop. A key feature of the model is the extensive use of dependent types to maintain agreement between the parts of the model. We use type dependency to represent well-formedness of types and terms, and to keep track of the relation between the denotations of types and the parametricity relations between them. We have used an extension of this formalisation in other research, where we proved that the parametric polymorphic representation of Higher-Order Abstract Syntax is adequate

Pragmatic Isomorphism Proofs Between Coq Representations: Application to Lambda-Term Families

There are several ways to formally represent families of data, such as lambda terms, in a type theory such as the dependent type theory of Coq. Mathematical representations are very compact ones and usually rely on the use of dependent types, but they tend to be difficult to handle in practice. On the contrary, implementations based on a larger (and simpler) data structure combined with a restriction property are much easier to deal with. In this work, we study several families related to lambda terms, among which Motzkin trees, seen as lambda term skeletons, closable Motzkin trees, corresponding to closed lambda terms, and a parameterized family of open lambda terms. For each of these families, we define two different representations, show that they are isomorphic and provide tools to switch from one representation to another. All these datatypes and their associated transformations are implemented in the Coq proof assistant. Furthermore we implement random generators for each representation, using the QuickChick plugin

A Reflection on Types

The ability to perform type tests at runtime blurs the line between statically-typed and dynamically-checked languages. Recent developments in Haskell’s type system allow even programs that use reflection to themselves be statically typed, using a type-indexed runtime representation of types called \{}\textit{TypeRep}. As a result we can build dynamic types as an ordinary, statically-typed library, on top of \{}\textit{TypeRep} in an open-world context

Toward a verified relational database management system

We report on our experience implementing a lightweight, fully verified relational database management system (RDBMS). The functional specification of RDBMS behavior, RDBMS implementation, and proof that the implementation meets the specification are all written and verified in Coq. Our contributions include: (1) a complete specification of the relational algebra in Coq; (2) an efficient realization of that model (B+ trees) implemented with the Ynot extension to Coq; and (3) a set of simple query optimizations that are proven to respect both semantics and run-time cost. In addition to describing the design and implementation of these artifacts, we highlight the challenges we encountered formalizing them, including the choice of representation for (finite) relations of typed tuples and the challenges of reasoning about data structures with complex sharing. Our experience shows that though many challenges remain, building fully-verified systems software in Coq is within reach.Engineering and Applied Science

A Reflection on Types

The ability to perform type tests at runtime blurs the line between statically-typed and dynamically-checked languages. Recent developments in Haskell’s type system allow even programs that use reflection to themselves be statically typed, using a type-indexed runtime representation of types called \{}\textit{TypeRep}. As a result we can build dynamic types as an ordinary, statically-typed library, on top of \{}\textit{TypeRep} in an open-world context