The Meaning of Types From Intrinsic to Extrinsic Semantics

Abstract

A definition of a typed language is said to be "intrinsic" if it assignsmeanings to typings rather than arbitrary phrases, so that ill-typedphrases are meaningless. In contrast, a definition is said to be "extrinsic"if all phrases have meanings that are independent of their typings,while typings represent properties of these meanings.For a simply typed lambda calculus, extended with recursion, subtypes,and named products, we give an intrinsic denotational semanticsand a denotational semantics of the underlying untyped language. Wethen establish a logical relations theorem between these two semantics,and show that the logical relations can be "bracketed" by retractionsbetween the domains of the two semantics. From these results, wederive an extrinsic semantics that uses partial equivalence relations

    Similar works