Idris, a general-purpose dependently typed programming language: Design and implementation

Abstract

AbstractMany components of a dependently typed programming language are by now well understood, for example, the underlying type theory, type checking, unification and evaluation. How to combine these components into a realistic and usable high-level language is, however, folklore, discovered anew by successive language implementors. In this paper, I describe the implementation ofIdris, a new dependently typed functional programming language.Idrisis intended to be ageneral-purposeprogramming language and as such provides high-level concepts such as implicit syntax, type classes anddonotation. I describe the high-level language and the underlying type theory, and present a tactic-based method forelaboratingconcrete high-level syntax with implicit arguments and type classes into a fully explicit type theory. Furthermore, I show how this method facilitates the implementation of new high-level language constructs.