Calculus Of Constructions Research Articles

Design and formal proof of a new optimal image segmentation program with hypermaps

This article presents the design of a new functional 2D image segmentation algorithm by cell merging in a subdivision, its proof of total correctness, and the derivation of an optimal imperative program. The planar subdivisions are modeled by hypermaps. The formal specifications of hypermaps and segmentation are developed in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions. The proofs are assisted by the Coq system. The final program is written in C.

Innovations in computational type theory using Nuprl

For twenty years the Nuprl (“new pearl”) system has been used to develop software systems and formal theories of computational mathematics. It has also been used to explore and implement computational type theory (CTT)—a formal theory of computation closely related to Martin-Löf's intuitionistic type theory (ITT) and to the calculus of inductive constructions (CIC) implemented in the Coq prover. This article focuses on the theory and practice underpinning our use of Nuprl for much of the last decade. We discuss innovative elements of type theory, including new type constructors such as unions and dependent intersections, our theory of classes, and our theory of event structures. We also discuss the innovative architecture of Nuprl as a distributed system and as a transactional database of formal mathematics using the notion of abstract object identifiers. The database has led to an independent project called the Formal Digital Library, FDL, now used as a repository for Nuprl results as well as selected results from HOL, MetaPRL, and PVS. We discuss Howe's set theoretic semantics that is used to relate such disparate theories and systems as those represented by these provers.

Is ZF a hack?: Comparing the complexity of some (formalist interpretations of) foundational systems for mathematics

This paper presents Automath encodings (which are also valid in LF/ λP) of various kinds of foundations of mathematics. Then it compares these encodings according to their size, to find out which foundation is the simplest. The systems analyzed in this way are two kinds of set theory (ZFC and NF), two systems based on Church's higher order logic (Isabelle/Pure and HOL), three kinds of type theory (the calculus of constructions, Luo's extended calculus of constructions, and Martin-Löf's predicative type theory) and one foundation based on category theory. The conclusions of this paper are that the simplest system is type theory (the calculus of constructions), but that type theories that know about serious mathematics are not simple at all. In that case the set theories are the simplest. If one looks at the number of concepts needed to explain such a system, then higher order logic is the simplest, with twenty-five concepts. On the other side of the scale, category theory is relatively complex, as is Martin-Löf's type theory. (The full Automath sources of the contexts described in this paper are one the web at http://www.cs.ru.nl/~freek/zfc-etc/.)

The Open Calculus of Constructions (Part II): An Equational Type Theory with Dependent Types for Programming, Specification, and Interactive Theorem Proving

The open calculus of constructions integrates key features of Martin-Lf's type theory, the calculus of constructions, membership equational logic, and rewriting logic into a single uniform language...

Definitions by rewriting in the Calculus of Constructions

This paper presents general syntactic conditions ensuring the strong normalization and the logical consistency of the Calculus of Algebraic Constructions, an extension of the Calculus of Constructions with functions and predicates defined by higher-order rewrite rules. On the one hand, the Calculus of Constructions is a powerful type system in which one can formalize the propositions and natural deduction proofs of higher-order logic. On the other hand, rewriting is a simple and powerful computation paradigm. The combination of both allows, among other things, to develop formal proofs with a reduced size and more automation compared with more traditional proof assistants. The main novelty is to consider a general form of rewriting at the predicate-level which generalizes the strong elimination of the Calculus of Inductive Constructions.

A type system for certified binaries

A certified binary is a value together with a proof that the value satisfies a given specification. Existing compilers that generate certified code have focused on simple memory and control-flow safety rather than more advanced properties. In this article, we present a general framework for explicitly representing complex propositions and proofs in typed intermediate and assembly languages. The new framework allows us to reason about certified programs that involve effects while still maintaining decidable typechecking. We show how to integrate an entire proof system (the calculus of inductive constructions) into a compiler intermediate language and how the intermediate language can undergo complex transformations (CPS and closure conversion) while preserving proofs represented in the type system. Our work provides a foundation for the process of automatically generating certified binaries in a type-theoretic framework.

Representing the MSR Cryptoprotocol Specification Language in an Extension of Rewriting Logic with Dependent Types

This paper presents a shallow and hence efficient embedding of the security protocol specification language MSR into rewriting logic with dependent types, an instance of the open calculus of constructions which integrates key concepts from equational logic, rewriting logic, and type theory. MSR is based on a form of first-order multiset rewriting extended with existential name generation and a flexible type infrastructure centered on dependent types with subsorting. This encoding is intended to serve as the basis for implementing an MSR specification and analysis environment using existing first-order rewriting engines such as Maude.

Soundness of Coercion in the Calculus of Constructions

A coercive subtyping system for the Calculus of Constructions is presented. The proposed system λC≤co is obtained essentially by adding coercions and η-conversion to λC≤, which is a subtyping extension to the Calculus of Constructions without coercions. We proved that a coercion c:A ≤ B is semantically sound. That is, (1) c is a term of type A → B; (2) c behaves like an identity function. This development follows the spirit of semantical interpretation of subtyping.

Variants of the basic calculus of constructions

In this paper, a number of different versions of the basic calculus of constructions that have appeared in the literature are compared and the exact relationships between them are determined. The biggest differences between versions are those between the original version of Coquand and the version in early papers on the subject by Seldin. None of these results is very deep, but it seems useful to collect them in one place.

Interpreting HOL in the calculus of constructions

The purpose of this paper is to consider a representation of the HOL theorem-prover in the calculus of constructions with the property that consistency results from the calculus of constructions imply such results in HOL. This kind of representation is impossible using the propositions-as-types representation of logic and equality, but it is possible if a different representation is used.

Equilogical spaces

It is well known that one can build models of full higher-order dependent-type theory (also called the calculus of constructions) using partial equivalence relations (PERs) and assemblies over a partial combinatory algebra. But the idea of categories of PERs and ERs (total equivalence relations) can be applied to other structures as well. In particular, we can easily define the category of ERs and equivalence-preserving continuous mappings over the standard category Top 0 of topological T 0-spaces; we call these spaces (a topological space together with an ER) equilogical spaces and the resulting category Equ. We show that this category—in contradistinction to Top 0 —is a cartesian closed category. The direct proof outlined here uses the equivalence of the category Equ to the category PEqu of PERs over algebraic lattices (a full subcategory of Top 0 that is well known to be cartesian closed from domain theory). In another paper with Carboni and Rosolini (cited herein), a more abstract categorical generalization shows why many such categories are cartesian closed. The category Equ obviously contains Top 0 as a full subcategory, and it naturally contains many other well known subcategories. In particular, we show why, as a consequence of work of Ershov, Berger, and others, the Kleene–Kreisel hierarchy of countable functionals of finite types can be naturally constructed in Equ from the natural numbers object N by repeated use in Equ of exponentiation and binary products. We also develop for Equ notions of modest sets (a category equivalent to Equ) and assemblies to explain why a model of dependent type theory is obtained. We make some comparisons of this model to other, known models.

An Axiomatization of Linear Temporal Logic in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions

We present in this paper a shallow embedding of Linear Temporal Logic in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions. Our axiomatization is based on a co-inductive representation of program executions. Temporal operators are implemented as co-inductive (respectively inductive) types when they are greatest (respectively least) fixpoints, and several generic lemmas are proved to allow elegant and efficient reasoning in practical cases. This work results in several reusable libraries in the Coq proof-assistant.

Termination of rewriting in the Calculus of Constructions

We show how to incorporate rewriting into the Calculus of Constructions and we prove that the resulting system is strongly normalizing with respect to beta and rewrite reductions. An important novelty of this paper is the possibility to define rewriting rules over dependently typed function symbols. We prove strong normalization for any term rewriting system, such that all function symbols satisfy the, so called, star dependency condition, and every rule is accepted by the Higher Order Recursive Path Ordering (which is an extension of the method created by Jouannaud and Rubio for the setting of the simply typed lambda calculus). The proof of strong normalization is done by using a typed version of reducibility candidates due to Coquand and Gallier. Our criterion is general enough to accept definitions by rewriting of many well-known higher order functions, for example dependent recursors for inductive types or proof carrying functions. This makes it a very good candidate for inclusion in a proof assistant based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism.

Coercive subtyping for the calculus of constructions

We present a coercive subtyping system for the calculus of constructions. The proposed system λ C CO over≤ is obtained essentially by adding coercions and η-conversion to λ C ≤ [10], which is a subtyping extension to the calculus of constructions without coercions. Following [17, 18], the coercive subtyping c : A η B is understood as a special case of typing in arrow type c : A → B such that the term c behaves like an identity function. We prove that, with respect to this semantic interpretation, the proposed coercive subtyping system is sound and complete, and that this completeness leads to transitivity elimination (transitivity rule is admissible). In addition, we establish the equivalence between λ C CO over≤ and CC ßη , this fact implies that λ C CO over≤ has confluence, subject reduction and strong normalization. We propose a formalization of coercion inference problem and present a sound and complete coercion inference algorithm.

Ambient Calculus and its Logic in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions

The Ambient Calculus has been recently proposed as a model of mobility of agents in a dynamically changing hierarchy of domains. In this paper, we describe the implementation of the theory and metatheory of Ambient Calculus and its modal logic in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions. We take full advantage of Higher-Order Abstract Syntax, using the Theory of Contexts a fundamental tool for developing formally the metatheory of the object system. Among others, we have successfully proved a set of fresh renamings properties, and formalized the connection between the Theory of Contexts and Gabbay-Pitts' “new” quantifier. As a feedback, we introduce a new definition of satisfaction for the Ambients logic and derive some of the properties originally assumed as axioms in the Theory of Contexts.

Tagless staged interpreters for typed languages

Multi-stage programming languages provide a convenient notation for explicitly staging programs. Staging a definitional interpreter for a domain specific language is one way of deriving an implementation that is both readable and efficient. In an untyped setting, staging an interpreter "removes a complete layer of interpretive overhead", just like partial evaluation. In a typed setting however, Hindley-Milner type systems do not allow us to exploit typing information in the language being interpreted . In practice, this can mean a slowdown cost by a factor of three or mor.Previously, both type specialization and tag elimination were applied to this problem. In this paper we propose an alternative approach, namely, expressing the definitional interpreter in a dependently typed programming language. We report on our experience with the issues that arise in writing such an interpreter and in designing such a language. .To demonstrate the soundness of combining staging and dependent types in a general sense, we formalize our language (called Meta-D) and prove its type safety. To formalize Meta-D, we extend Shao, Saha, Trifonov and Papaspyrou's λH language to a multi-level setting. Building on λH allows us to demonstrate type safety in a setting where the type language contains all the calculus of inductive constructions, but without having to repeat the work needed for establishing the soundness of that system.

A type system for certified binaries

A certified binary is a value together with a proof that the value satisfies a given specification. Existing compilers that generate certified code have focused on simple memory and control-flow safety rather than more advanced properties. In this paper, we present a general framework for explicitly representing complex propositions and proofs in typed intermediate and assembly languages. The new framework allows us to reason about certified programs that involve effects while still maintaining decidable typechecking. We show how to integrate an entire proof system (the calculus of inductive constructions) into a compiler intermediate language and how the intermediate language can undergo complex transformations (CPS and closure conversion) while preserving proofs represented in the type system. Our work provides a foundation for the process of automatically generating certified binaries in a typetheoretic framework.

External Rewriting for Skeptical Proof Assistants

This paper presents the design, the implementation, and experiments of the integration of syntactic, conditional possibly associative-commutative term rewriting into proof assistants based on constructive type theory. Our approach is called external because it consists in performing term rewriting in a specific and efficient environment and checking the computations later in a proof assistant. Two typical systems are considered in this work: ELAN, based on the rewriting calculus, as the term rewriting-based environment, and Coq, based on the calculus of inductive constructions as the proof assistant. We first formalize the proof terms for deduction by rewriting and strategies in ELAN using the rewriting calculus with explicit substitutions. We then show how these proof terms can soundly be translated into Coq syntax where they can be directly type checked. For the method to be applicable for rewriting modulo associativity and commutativity, we provide an effective method to prove equalities modulo these axioms in Coq using ELAN. These results have been integrated into an ELAN-based rewriting tactic in Coq.

Recursion over objects of functional type

This paper presents an extension of the simply typed λ-calculus that allows iteration and case reasoning over terms of functional types that arise when using higher order abstract syntax. This calculus aims at being the kernel for a type theory in which the user will be able to formalize logics or formal systems using the LF methodology, while taking advantage of new induction and recursion principles, extending the principles available in a calculus such as the Calculus of Inductive Constructions. The key idea of our system is the use of modal logic S4. We present here the system, its typing rules and reduction rules. The system enjoys the decidability of typability, soundness of typed reduction with respect to the typing rules, the Church–Rosser and strong normalization properties and it is a conservative extension over the simply typed λ-calculus. These properties entail the preservation of the adequacy of encodings.

Extensional Set Equality in the Calculus of Constructions

Extensional Set Equality in the Calculus of Constructions