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

Computability Closure: Ten Years Later

The notion of computability closure has been introduced for proving the termination of higher-order rewriting with first-order matching by Jean-Pierre Jouannaud and Mitsuhiro Okada in a 1997 draft which later served as a basis for the author's PhD. In this paper, we show how this notion can also be used for dealing with beta-normalized rewriting with matching modulo beta-eta (on patterns \`a la Miller), rewriting with matching modulo some equational theory, and higher-order data types (types with constructors having functional recursive arguments). Finally, we show how the computability closure can easily be turned into a reduction ordering which, in the higher-order case, contains Jean-Pierre Jouannaud and Albert Rubio's higher-order recursive path ordering and, in the first-order case, is equal to the usual first-order recursive path ordering

Termination of rewrite relations on λ\lambda-terms based on Girard's notion of reducibility

In this paper, we show how to extend the notion of reducibility introduced by Girard for proving the termination of $\beta$-reduction in the polymorphic $\lambda$-calculus, to prove the termination of various kinds of rewrite relations on $\lambda$-terms, including rewriting modulo some equational theory and rewriting with matching modulo $\beta$$\eta$, by using the notion of computability closure. This provides a powerful termination criterion for various higher-order rewriting frameworks, including Klop's Combinatory Reductions Systems with simple types and Nipkow's Higher-order Rewrite Systems

(HO)RPO Revisited

The notion of computability closure has been introduced for proving the termination of the combination of higher-order rewriting and beta-reduction. It is also used for strengthening the higher-order recursive path ordering. In the present paper, we study in more details the relations between the computability closure and the (higher-order) recursive path ordering. We show that the first-order recursive path ordering is equal to an ordering naturally defined from the computability closure. In the higher-order case, we get an ordering containing the higher-order recursive path ordering whose well-foundedness relies on the correctness of the computability closure. This provides a simple way to extend the higher-order recursive path ordering to richer type systems

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..

A point on fixpoints in posets

Let $(X,\le)$ be a {\em non-empty strictly inductive poset}, that is, a non-empty partially ordered set such that every non-empty chain $Y$ has a least upper bound lub$(Y)\in X$, a chain being a subset of $X$ totally ordered by $\le$. We are interested in sufficient conditions such that, given an element $a_0\in X$ and a function f:X\a X, there is some ordinal $k$ such that $a_{k+1}=a_k$, where $a\_k$ is the transfinite sequence of iterates of $f$ starting from $a_0$ (implying that $a_k$ is a fixpoint of $f$): \begin{itemize}\itemsep=0mm \item $a_{k+1}=f(a_k)$ \item a_l=\lub\{a_k\mid k \textless{} l\} if $l$ is a limit ordinal, i.e. $l=lub(l)$ \end{itemize} This note summarizes known results about this problem and provides a slight generalization of some of them

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

Combining typing and size constraints for checking the termination of higher-order conditional rewrite systems

In a previous work, the first author extended to higher-order rewriting and dependent types the use of size annotations in types, a termination proof technique called type or size based termination and initially developed for ML-like programs. Here, we go one step further by considering conditional rewriting and explicit quantifications and constraints on size annotations. This allows to describe more precisely how the size of the output of a function depends on the size of its inputs. Hence, we can check the termination of more functions. We first give a general type-checking algorithm based on constraint solving. Then, we give a termination criterion with constraints in Presburger arithmetic. To our knowledge, this is the first termination criterion for higher-order conditional rewriting taking into account the conditions in termination

Automated verification of termination certificates

In order to increase user confidence, many automated theorem provers provide certificates that can be independently verified. In this paper, we report on our progress in developing a standalone tool for checking the correctness of certificates for the termination of term rewrite systems, and formally proving its correctness in the proof assistant Coq. To this end, we use the extraction mechanism of Coq and the library on rewriting theory and termination called CoLoR