Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

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> By the way, the idea of deliberately limiting the expressive power of types isn't new: the Damas-Milner type system, which is most certainly known and proven technology, is a first-order subset of System F-omega's type system for which type inference is possible. A dependently typed language with a first-order type level would benefit from reusing the basic architecture of a Damas-Milner type checker: a constraint generator and a constraint solver powered by a first-order unification engine.

Have you seen languages like DML (let's you capture linear arithmetic properties only and automates the proof of these)?

https://www.cs.bu.edu/~hwxi/DML/DML.html

> Dependent ML (DML) is a conservative extension of the functional programming language ML. The type system of DML enriches that of ML with a restricted form of dependent types. This allows many interesting program properties such as memory safety and termination to be captured in the type system of DML and then be verified at compiler-time.

What program properties are useful to capture and what properties you can mostly automate is a really interesting problem.

> Have you seen languages like DML (let's you capture linear arithmetic properties only and automates the proof of these)?

Yes. But what I have in mind is a little bit more ambitious. I want dependent types restricted to be parameterized by syntactic values (in the sense of ML's value restriction) of what Standard ML calls `eqtype`s. For example, correctly balanced red-black trees would be:

    (* clearly eqtypes *)
    datatype Color = R' | B'
    datatype Nat = Z | S : Nat -> Nat
    
    datatype Tree =
      | Empty : Tree (B', Z, 'a)
      | R : Tree (B', 'h, 'a) * 'a * Tree (B', 'h, 'a) -> Tree (R', 'h, 'a)
      | B : Tree ('c, 'h, 'a) * 'a * Tree ('c, 'h, 'a) -> Tree (B', S 'h, 'a)

Any examples? I'm curious for examples of a nontrivial type that would catch lots of common programming errors where the proofs can be automated. I see lots of new dependently typed languages but not much interest in addressing the proof automation aspect.

I'd love to give more concrete examples, but I'm slightly hampered by the fact the type system I want isn't actually implemented anywhere. I have a rough sketch of the design of the type system I want, and I've been looking for a computer scientist, logician or mathematician to help me polish the design and prove that it is, in fact, type safe. But I couldn't find anyone. :-|

Why not just learn Coq or Agda yourself? There are also sorts of introductions for simple type systems that I'm sure you can build off of.

I have no idea how to implement fresh unification variable generation (my type system is a superset of Damas-Milner, kind of like how the calculus of constructions is a superset of System F-omega) in Coq or Agda. Everywhere I've seen it implemented, it involves mutable state. So, “in principle”, I could fake it using something like the state monad, and plumbing around the collection of unification variables generated so far, but in practice reasoning about this seems like a pain.

You could take a look at Coquand (2002) “A formalised proof of the soundness and completeness of a simply typed lambda-calculus with explicit substitutions”.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xmj7yv1i1moe0ag/Coquand2002.pdf

Drop in to #dependent on Freenode IRC, and let’s chat.

You don't need type theory to verify program properties, people have been using first-order methods for decades to prove properties about programs. For example there was a line of work in ACL2 that verified a microprocessor implementation, as well as plenty of modern work using tools like SMT to automatically prove program properties, see Dafny, F* for language based approaches. Though there is plenty of language agnostic approaches as well. My colleagues at UW have a paper in this year's OSDI verifying crash consistency for a realistic file system with no manual proof.

Nice. SMT can be (and indeed has been) integrated into type-based approaches to program verification as well.

Yeah I think SMT is really the state-of-the-art right now in this area. Leo De Moura (one of the main authors of Z3) has been working on Lean for the past couple of years. There is a small group of us (5~) who have been working on a big release for the past couple of months. The goal is to bring the easy of use of SMT automation to type theory, so you can get both the ability to do induction and automation.

Lean: http://leanprover.github.io/

I wish you guys good luck. Freedom from Coq-style proof scripts should be the goal.

If (like me) you didn't know what the abbreviation SMT stands for -- I looked it up and it is Shiver Me Timbers http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Shiver+Me+Timbers Seems to be some kind of pirate speak.

Only kidding! It stands for Satisfiability Modulo Theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfiability_modulo_theories

“In computer science and mathematical logic, the satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) problem is a decision problem for logical formulas with respect to combinations of background theories expressed in classical first-order logic with equality. Examples of theories typically used in computer science are the theory of real numbers, the theory of integers, and the theories of various data structures such as lists, arrays, bit vectors and so on. SMT can be thought of as a form of the constraint satisfaction problem and thus a certain formalized approach to constraint programming.”

I'm not sure I'm any the wiser after that …

A notable building block appears to be SMT-LIB http://smtlib.cs.uiowa.edu/index.shtml

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