1,309 research outputs found
Consistency and Completeness of Rewriting in the Calculus of Constructions
Adding rewriting to a proof assistant based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism,
such as Coq, may greatly improve usability of the tool. Unfortunately adding an
arbitrary set of rewrite rules may render the underlying formal system
undecidable and inconsistent. While ways to ensure termination and confluence,
and hence decidability of type-checking, have already been studied to some
extent, logical consistency has got little attention so far. In this paper we
show that consistency is a consequence of canonicity, which in turn follows
from the assumption that all functions defined by rewrite rules are complete.
We provide a sound and terminating, but necessarily incomplete algorithm to
verify this property. The algorithm accepts all definitions that follow
dependent pattern matching schemes presented by Coquand and studied by McBride
in his PhD thesis. It also accepts many definitions by rewriting, containing
rules which depart from standard pattern matching.Comment: 20 page
Building Decision Procedures in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions
It is commonly agreed that the success of future proof assistants will rely
on their ability to incorporate computations within deduction in order to mimic
the mathematician when replacing the proof of a proposition P by the proof of
an equivalent proposition P' obtained from P thanks to possibly complex
calculations. In this paper, we investigate a new version of the calculus of
inductive constructions which incorporates arbitrary decision procedures into
deduction via the conversion rule of the calculus. The novelty of the problem
in the context of the calculus of inductive constructions lies in the fact that
the computation mechanism varies along proof-checking: goals are sent to the
decision procedure together with the set of user hypotheses available from the
current context. Our main result shows that this extension of the calculus of
constructions does not compromise its main properties: confluence, subject
reduction, strong normalization and consistency are all preserved
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