177 research outputs found
Higher-Order Termination: from Kruskal to Computability
Termination is a major question in both logic and computer science. In logic,
termination is at the heart of proof theory where it is usually called strong
normalization (of cut elimination). In computer science, termination has always
been an important issue for showing programs correct. In the early days of
logic, strong normalization was usually shown by assigning ordinals to
expressions in such a way that eliminating a cut would yield an expression with
a smaller ordinal. In the early days of verification, computer scientists used
similar ideas, interpreting the arguments of a program call by a natural
number, such as their size. Showing the size of the arguments to decrease for
each recursive call gives a termination proof of the program, which is however
rather weak since it can only yield quite small ordinals. In the sixties, Tait
invented a new method for showing cut elimination of natural deduction, based
on a predicate over the set of terms, such that the membership of an expression
to the predicate implied the strong normalization property for that expression.
The predicate being defined by induction on types, or even as a fixpoint, this
method could yield much larger ordinals. Later generalized by Girard under the
name of reducibility or computability candidates, it showed very effective in
proving the strong normalization property of typed lambda-calculi..
Inductive-data-type Systems
In a previous work ("Abstract Data Type Systems", TCS 173(2), 1997), the last
two authors presented a combined language made of a (strongly normalizing)
algebraic rewrite system and a typed lambda-calculus enriched by
pattern-matching definitions following a certain format, called the "General
Schema", which generalizes the usual recursor definitions for natural numbers
and similar "basic inductive types". This combined language was shown to be
strongly normalizing. The purpose of this paper is to reformulate and extend
the General Schema in order to make it easily extensible, to capture a more
general class of inductive types, called "strictly positive", and to ease the
strong normalization proof of the resulting system. This result provides a
computation model for the combination of an algebraic specification language
based on abstract data types and of a strongly typed functional language with
strictly positive inductive types.Comment: Theoretical Computer Science (2002
Definitions by Rewriting in the Calculus of Constructions
The main novelty of this paper is to consider an extension of the Calculus of
Constructions where predicates can be defined with a general form of rewrite
rules. We prove the strong normalization of the reduction relation generated by
the beta-rule and the user-defined rules under some general syntactic
conditions including confluence. As examples, we show that two important
systems satisfy these conditions: a sub-system of the Calculus of Inductive
Constructions which is the basis of the proof assistant Coq, and the Natural
Deduction Modulo a large class of equational theories.Comment: Best student paper (Kleene Award
On the confluence of lambda-calculus with conditional rewriting
The confluence of untyped \lambda-calculus with unconditional rewriting is
now well un- derstood. In this paper, we investigate the confluence of
\lambda-calculus with conditional rewriting and provide general results in two
directions. First, when conditional rules are algebraic. This extends results
of M\"uller and Dougherty for unconditional rewriting. Two cases are
considered, whether \beta-reduction is allowed or not in the evaluation of
conditions. Moreover, Dougherty's result is improved from the assumption of
strongly normalizing \beta-reduction to weakly normalizing \beta-reduction. We
also provide examples showing that outside these conditions, modularity of
confluence is difficult to achieve. Second, we go beyond the algebraic
framework and get new confluence results using a restricted notion of
orthogonality that takes advantage of the conditional part of rewrite rules
The computability path ordering: the end of a quest
In this paper, we first briefly survey automated termination proof methods
for higher-order calculi. We then concentrate on the higher-order recursive
path ordering, for which we provide an improved definition, the Computability
Path Ordering. This new definition appears indeed to capture the essence of
computability arguments \`a la Tait and Girard, therefore explaining the name
of the improved ordering.Comment: Dans CSL'08 (2008
Inductive types in the Calculus of Algebraic Constructions
In a previous work, we proved that an important part of the Calculus of
Inductive Constructions (CIC), the basis of the Coq proof assistant, can be
seen as a Calculus of Algebraic Constructions (CAC), an extension of the
Calculus of Constructions with functions and predicates defined by higher-order
rewrite rules. In this paper, we prove that almost all CIC can be seen as a
CAC, and that it can be further extended with non-strictly positive types and
inductive-recursive types together with non-free constructors and
pattern-matching on defined symbols.Comment: Journal version of TLCA'0
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