Relational parametricity for higher kinds

Reynolds’ notion of relational parametricity has been extremely influential and well studied for polymorphic programming languages and type theories based on System F. The extension of relational parametricity to higher kinded polymorphism, which allows quantification over type operators as well as types, has not received as much attention. We present a model of relational parametricity for System Fω, within the impredicative Calculus of Inductive Constructions, and show how it forms an instance of a general class of models defined by Hasegawa. We investigate some of the consequences of our model and show that it supports the definition of inductive types, indexed by an arbitrary kind, and with reasoning principles provided by initiality

A Relationally Parametric Model of Dependent Type Theory

Reynolds’ theory of relational parametricity captures the invariance of polymorphically typed programs under change of data representation. Reynolds’ original work exploited the typing discipline of the polymorphically typed -calculus System F, but there is now considerable interest in extending relational parametricity to type systems that are richer and more expressive than that of System F.This paper constructs parametric models of predicative and impredicative dependent type theory. The significance of our models is twofold. Firstly, in the impredicative variant we are able to deduce the existence of initial algebras for all indexed functors. To our knowledge, ours is the first account of parametricity for dependent types that is able to lift the useful deduction of the existence of initial algebras in parametric models of System F to the dependently typed setting. Secondly, our models offer conceptual clarity by uniformly expressing relational parametricity for dependent types in terms of reflexive graphs, which allows us to unify the interpretations of types and kinds, instead of taking the relational interpretation of types as a primitive notion. Expressing our model in terms of reflexive graphs ensures that it has canonical choices for the interpretations of the standard type constructors of dependent type theory, except for the interpretation of the universe of small types, where we formulate a refined interpretation tailored for relational parametricity. Moreover, our reflexive graph model opens the door to generalizations of relational parametricity, for example to higher-dimensional relational parametricity

Proofs for free - parametricity for dependent types

Reynolds' abstraction theorem shows how a typing judgement in System F can be translated into a relational statement (in second order predicate logic) about inhabitants of the type. We obtain a similar result for pure type systems: for any PTS used as a programming language, there is a PTS that can be used as a logic for parametricity. Types in the source PTS are translated to relations (expressed as types) in the target. Similarly, values of a given type are translated to proofs that the values satisfy the relational interpretation. We extend the result to inductive families. We also show that the assumption that every term satisfies the parametricity condition generated by its type is consistent with the generated logic

The Refined Calculus of Inductive Construction: Parametricity and Abstraction

We present a refinement of the Calculus of Inductive Constructions in which one can easily define a notion of relational parametricity. It provides a new way to automate proofs in an interactive theorem prover like Coq

Relational Parametricity and Separation Logic

Separation logic is a recent extension of Hoare logic for reasoning about programs with references to shared mutable data structures. In this paper, we provide a new interpretation of the logic for a programming language with higher types. Our interpretation is based on Reynolds's relational parametricity, and it provides a formal connection between separation logic and data abstraction

Fibred Fibration Categories

We introduce fibred type-theoretic fibration categories which are fibred categories between categorical models of Martin-L\"{o}f type theory. Fibred type-theoretic fibration categories give a categorical description of logical predicates for identity types. As an application, we show a relational parametricity result for homotopy type theory. As a corollary, it follows that every closed term of type of polymorphic endofunctions on a loop space is homotopic to some iterated concatenation of a loop

Dynamic IFC Theorems for Free!

We show that noninterference and transparency, the key soundness theorems for dynamic IFC libraries, can be obtained "for free", as direct consequences of the more general parametricity theorem of type abstraction. This allows us to give very short soundness proofs for dynamic IFC libraries such as faceted values and LIO. Our proofs stay short even when fully mechanized for Agda implementations of the libraries in terms of type abstraction.Comment: CSF 2021 final versio

From parametricity to conservation laws, via Noether's Theorem

Invariance is of paramount importance in programming languages and in physics. In programming languages, John Reynolds' theory of relational parametricity demonstrates that parametric polymorphic programs are invariant under change of data representation, a property that yields "free" theorems about programs just from their types. In physics, Emmy Noether showed that if the action of a physical system is invariant under change of coordinates, then the physical system has a conserved quantity: a quantity that remains constant for all time. Knowledge of conserved quantities can reveal deep properties of physical systems. For example, the conservation of energy is by Noether's theorem a consequence of a system's invariance under time-shifting. In this paper, we link Reynolds' relational parametricity with Noether's theorem for deriving conserved quantities. We propose an extension of System Fω with new kinds, types and term constants for writing programs that describe classical mechanical systems in terms of their Lagrangians. We show, by constructing a relationally parametric model of our extension of Fω, that relational parametricity is enough to satisfy the hypotheses of Noether's theorem, and so to derive conserved quantities for free, directly from the polymorphic types of Lagrangians expressed in our system

Bidirectionalization for Free with Runtime Recording: Or, a Light-Weight Approach to the View-Update Problem

A bidirectional transformation is a pair of mappings between source and view data objects, one in each direction. When the view is modified, the source is updated accordingly with respect to some laws. Over the years, a lot of effort has been made to offer better language support for programming such transformations. In particular, a technique known as bidirectionalization is able to analyze and transform unidirectional programs written in general purpose languages, and "bidirectionalize" them. Among others, a technique termed as semantic bidirectionalization proposed by Voigtländer stands out in term of user-friendliness. The unidirectional program can be written using arbitrary language constructs, as long as the function is polymorphic and the language constructs respect parametricity. The free theorems that follow from the polymorphic type of the program allow a kind of forensic examination of the transformation, determining its effect without examining its implementation. This is convenient, in the sense that the programmer is not restricted to using a particular syntax; but it does require the transformation to be polymorphic. In this paper, we lift this polymorphism requirement to improve the applicability of semantic bidirectionalization. Concretely, we provide a type class PackM γ α μ, which intuitively reads "a concrete datatype γ is abstracted to a type α, and the 'observations' made by a transformation on values of type γ are recorded by a monad μ". With PackM, we turn monomorphic transformations into polymorphic ones, that are ready to be bidirectionalized. We demonstrate our technique with a case study of standard XML queries, which were considered beyond semantic bidirectionalization because of their monomorphic nature