Pattern Matching and Fixed Points: Resource Types and Strong Call-By-Need: Extended Abstract

PABLO BARENBAUM; EDUARDO BONELLI; KAREEM MOHAMED

Frankfurt am Main

Conferencia; International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming; 2018

Goethe-Universität

Resource types are types that statically quantify some aspect of program execution. They come in various guises; this paper focusses on a manifestation of resource types known as non-idempotent intersection types. We use them to characterize weak normalisation for a type-erased lambda calculus for the Calculus of Inductive Construction (λe), as introduced by Gregoire and Leroy. The λe calculus consists of the lambda calculus together with constructors, pattern matching and a fixed-point operator. The characterization is then used to prove the completeness of a strong call-by-need strategy for λe. This strategy operates on open terms: rather than having evaluation stop when it reaches an abstraction, as in weak call-by-need, it computes strong normal forms by admitting reduction inside the body of abstractions and substitutions. Moreover, argument evaluation is by-need: arguments are evaluated when needed and at most once. Such a notion of reduction is of interest in areas such as partial evaluation and proof-checkers such as Coq.