Gluing together proof environments: Canonical extensions of LF type theories featuring locks

© F. Honsell, L. Liquori, P. Maksimovic, I. Scagnetto This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.We present two extensions of the LF Constructive Type Theory featuring monadic locks. A lock is a monadic type construct that captures the effect of an external call to an oracle. Such calls are the basic tool for gluing together diverse Type Theories and proof development environments. The oracle can be invoked either to check that a constraint holds or to provide a suitable witness. The systems are presented in the canonical style developed by the CMU School. The first system, CLLF/p,is the canonical version of the system LLF p, presented earlier by the authors. The second system, CLLF p?, features the possibility of invoking the oracle to obtain a witness satisfying a given constraint. We discuss encodings of Fitch-Prawitz Set theory, call-by-value λ-calculi, and systems of Light Linear Logic. Finally, we show how to use Fitch-Prawitz Set Theory to define a type system that types precisely the strongly normalizing terms

Functionality, Polymorphism, and Concurrency: A Mathematical Investigation of Programming Paradigms

The search for mathematical models of computational phenomena often leads to problems that are of independent mathematical interest. Selected problems of this kind are investigated in this thesis. First, we study models of the untyped lambda calculus. Although many familiar models are constructed by order-theoretic methods, it is also known that there are some models of the lambda calculus that cannot be non-trivially ordered. We show that the standard open and closed term algebras are unorderable. We characterize the absolutely unorderable T-algebras in any algebraic variety T. Here an algebra is called absolutely unorderable if it cannot be embedded in an orderable algebra. We then introduce a notion of finite models for the lambda calculus, contrasting the known fact that models of the lambda calculus, in the traditional sense, are always non-recursive. Our finite models are based on Plotkin’s syntactical models of reduction. We give a method for constructing such models, and some examples that show how finite models can yield useful information about terms. Next, we study models of typed lambda calculi. Models of the polymorphic lambda calculus can be divided into environment-style models, such as Bruce and Meyer’s non-strict set-theoretic models, and categorical models, such as Seely’s interpretation in PL-categories. Reynolds has shown that there are no set-theoretic strict models. Following a different approach, we investigate a notion of non-strict categorical models. These provide a uniform framework in which one can describe various classes of non-strict models, including set-theoretic models with or without empty types, and Kripke-style models. We show that completeness theorems correspond to categorical representation theorems, and we reprove a completeness result by Meyer et al. on set-theoretic models of the simply-typed lambda calculus with possibly empty types. Finally, we study properties of asynchronous communication in networks of communicating processes. We formalize several notions of asynchrony independently of any particular concurrent process paradigm. A process is asynchronous if its input and/or output is filtered through a communication medium, such as a buffer or a queue, possibly with feedback. We prove that the behavior of asynchronous processes can be equivalently characterized by first-order axioms

PML2: Integrated Program Verification in ML

We present the PML_2 language, which provides a uniform environment for programming, and for proving properties of programs in an ML-like setting. The language is Curry-style and call-by-value, it provides a control operator (interpreted in terms of classical logic), it supports general recursion and a very general form of (implicit, non-coercive) subtyping. In the system, equational properties of programs are expressed using two new type formers, and they are proved by constructing terminating programs. Although proofs rely heavily on equational reasoning, equalities are exclusively managed by the type-checker. This means that the user only has to choose which equality to use, and not where to use it, as is usually done in mathematical proofs. In the system, writing proofs mostly amounts to applying lemmas (possibly recursive function calls), and to perform case analyses (pattern matchings)

Types and Semantics for Extensible Data Types (Extended Version)

Developing and maintaining software commonly requires (1) adding new data type constructors to existing applications, but also (2) adding new functions that work on existing data. Most programming languages have native support for defining data types and functions in a way that supports either (1) or (2), but not both. This lack of native support makes it difficult to use and extend libraries. A theoretically well-studied solution is to define data types and functions using initial algebra semantics. While it is possible to encode this solution in existing programming languages, such encodings add syntactic and interpretive overhead, and commonly fail to take advantage of the map and fold fusion laws of initial algebras which compilers could exploit to generate more efficient code. A solution to these is to provide native support for initial algebra semantics. In this paper, we develop such a solution and present a type discipline and core calculus for a language with native support for initial algebra semantics.Comment: Extended version (28 pages) of the eponymous paper to appear in the conference proceedings of APLAS 202