2 research outputs found
Structural Induction Principles for Functional Programmers
User defined recursive types are a fundamental feature of modern functional
programming languages like Haskell, Clean, and the ML family of languages.
Properties of programs defined by recursion on the structure of recursive types
are generally proved by structural induction on the type. It is well known in
the theorem proving community how to generate structural induction principles
from data type declarations. These methods deserve to be better know in the
functional programming community. Existing functional programming textbooks
gloss over this material. And yet, if functional programmers do not know how to
write down the structural induction principle for a new type - how are they
supposed to reason about it? In this paper we describe an algorithm to generate
structural induction principles from data type declarations. We also discuss
how these methods are taught in the functional programming course at the
University of Wyoming. A Haskell implementation of the algorithm is included in
an appendix.Comment: In Proceedings TFPIE 2013, arXiv:1312.221