skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: A specification for dependent types in Haskell
We propose a core semantics for Dependent Haskell, an extension of Haskell with full-spectrum dependent types. Our semantics consists of two related languages. The first is a Curry-style dependently-typed language with nontermination, irrelevant arguments, and equality abstraction. The second, inspired by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler's core language FC, is its explicitly-typed analogue, suitable for implementation in GHC. All of our results---chiefly, type safety, along with theorems that relate these two languages---have been formalized using the Coq proof assistant. Because our work is backwards compatible with Haskell, our type safety proof holds in the presence of nonterminating computation. However, unlike other full-spectrum dependently-typed languages, such as Coq, Agda or Idris, because of this nontermination, Haskell's term language does not correspond to a consistent logic.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1521539 1319880
PAR ID:
10607850
Author(s) / Creator(s):
 ;  ;  ;  
Publisher / Repository:
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Volume:
1
Issue:
ICFP
ISSN:
2475-1421
Format(s):
Medium: X Size: p. 1-29
Size(s):
p. 1-29
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We present Turnstile+, a high-level, macros-based metaDSL for building dependently typed languages. With it, programmers may rapidly prototype and iterate on the design of new dependently typed features and extensions. Or they may create entirely new DSLs whose dependent type ``power'' is tailored to a specific domain. Our framework's support of language-oriented programming also makes it suitable for experimenting with systems of interacting components, e.g., a proof assistant and its companion DSLs. This paper explains the implementation details of Turnstile+, as well as how it may be used to create a wide-variety of dependently typed languages, from a lightweight one with indexed types, to a full spectrum proof assistant, complete with a tactic system and extensions for features like sized types and SMT interaction. 
    more » « less
  2. In dependently-typed functional programming languages that allow general recursion, programs used as proofs must be evaluated to retain type soundness. As a result, programmers must make a trade-off between performance and safety. To address this problem, we propose System DE, an explicitly-typed, moded core calculus that supports termination tracking and equality reflection. Programmers can write inductive proofs about potentially diverging programs in a logical sublanguage and reflect those proofs to the type checker, while knowing that such proofs will be erased by the compiler before execution. A key feature of System DE is its use of modes for both termination and relevance tracking, which not only simplifies the design but also leaves it open for future extension. System DE is suitable for use in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, but could serve as the basis for any general purpose dependently-typed language. 
    more » « less
  3. Modern Haskell supportszero-costcoercions, a mechanism where types that share the same run-time representation may be freely converted between. To make sure such conversions are safe and desirable, this feature relies on a mechanism ofrolesto prohibit invalid coercions. In this work, we show how to incorporate roles into dependent types systems and prove, using the Coq proof assistant, that the resulting system is sound. We have designed this work as a foundation for the addition of dependent types to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, but we also expect that it will be of use to designers of other dependently-typed languages who might want to adopt Haskell’s safe coercions feature. 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    Dependently typed languages allow programmers to state and prove type class laws by simply encoding the laws as class methods. But writing implementations of these methods frequently give way to large amounts of routine, boilerplate code, and depending on the law involved, the size of these proofs can grow superlinearly with the size of the datatypes involved. We present a technique for automating away large swaths of this boilerplate by leveraging datatype-generic programming. We observe that any algebraic data type has an equivalent representation type that is composed of simpler, smaller types that are simpler to prove theorems over. By constructing an isomorphism between a datatype and its representation type, we derive proofs for the original datatype by reusing the corresponding proof over the representation type. Our work is designed to be general-purpose and does not require advanced automation techniques such as tactic systems. As evidence for this claim, we implement these ideas in a Haskell library that defines generic, canonical implementations of the methods and proof obligations for classes in the standard base library. 
    more » « less
  5. Over twenty years ago, Abadi et al. established the Dependency Core Calculus (DCC) as a general purpose framework for analyzing dependency in typed programming languages. Since then, dependency analysis has shown many practical benefits to language design: its results can help users and compilers enforce security constraints, eliminate dead code, among other applications. In this work, we present a Dependent Dependency Calculus (DDC), which extends this general idea to the setting of a dependently-typed language. We use this calculus to track both run-time and compile-time irrelevance, enabling faster typechecking and program execution. 
    more » « less