A fresh look at programming with names and binders

Pouillard, Nicolas; Pottier, François

doi:10.1145/1863543.1863575

Cited by 26 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…It makes essential use of the quantification over substitutions in slam. Similar mechanisms appear in both Licata and Harper [2009] and Pouillard and Pottier [2010].…”

Section: Logical Relations: Normalization By Evaluationsupporting

confidence: 67%

“…Licata andHarper [2009] andShinwell et al [2003] lack dependent types. Pouillard and Pottier [2010] have this ability, although their implementation is untyped NbE, and hence does not employ it. Further, this illustrates that arbitrary mixing of computation and LF function spaces is not crucial to NbE, as suggested by Licata and Harper [2009].…”

Section: Logical Relations: Normalization By Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We use the fresh look approach to binding due to Pouillard and Pottier [2010], which is an abstract interface to well-scoped de Brujin indices. Informally we found that the additional abstraction pushed us towards a more high-level algebraic approach relying heavily on simultaneous substitutions in place of low level de Bruijn shifting.…”

Section: Mechanizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…• We have mechanized the typing rules, the operational semantics and the type safety proof (preservation and progress) in the proof assistant Coq. We use the fresh approach to binding by Pouillard and Pottier [2010] to model variables in our language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Programming with binders and indexed data-types

Cave

Pientka

2012

Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

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We show how to combine a general purpose type system for an existing language with support for programming with binders and contexts by refining the type system of ML with a restricted form of dependent types where index objects are drawn from contextual LF. This allows the user to specify formal systems within the logical framework LF and index ML types with contextual LF objects. Our language design keeps the index language generic only requiring decidability of equality of the index language providing a modular design. To illustrate the elegance and effectiveness of our language, we give programs for closure conversion and normalization by evaluation.Our three key technical contribution are: 1) We give a bidirectional type system for our core language which is centered around refinement substitutions instead of constraint solving. As a consequence, type checking is decidable and easy to trust, although constraint solving may be undecidable. 2) We give a big-step environment based operational semantics with environments which lends itself to efficient implementation. 3) We prove our language to be type safe and have mechanized our theoretical development in the proof assistant Coq using the fresh approach to binding.

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“…It makes essential use of the quantification over substitutions in slam. Similar mechanisms appear in both Licata and Harper [2009] and Pouillard and Pottier [2010].…”

Section: Logical Relations: Normalization By Evaluationsupporting

confidence: 67%

Section: Logical Relations: Normalization By Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mechanizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Programming with binders and indexed data-types

Cave

Pientka

2012

Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

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“…While this laxity leads to a familiar and flexible interface, it does not rule out bugs that could occur from names escaping their scope. Pottier et al have made progress in this respect [22,23], and we would like to explore a variant interface for UNBOUND that provides this tighter control.…”

Section: Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Binders unbound

Weirich¹,

Yorgey²,

Sheard³

2011

Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

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Implementors of compilers, program refactorers, theorem provers, proof checkers, and other systems that manipulate syntax know that dealing with name binding is difficult to do well. Operations such as α-equivalence and capture-avoiding substitution seem simple, yet subtle bugs often go undetected. Furthermore, their implementations are tedious, requiring "boilerplate" code that must be updated whenever the object language definition changes.Many researchers have therefore sought to specify binding syntax declaratively, so that tools can correctly handle the details behind the scenes. This idea has been the inspiration for many new systems (such as Beluga, Delphin, FreshML, FreshOCaml, Cαml, FreshLib, and Ott) but there is still room for improvement in expressivity, simplicity and convenience.In this paper, we present a new domain-specific language, UN-BOUND, for specifying binding structure. Our language is particularly expressive-it supports multiple atom types, pattern binders, type annotations, recursive binders, and nested binding (necessary for telescopes, a feature found in dependently-typed languages). However, our specification language is also simple, consisting of just five basic combinators. We provide a formal semantics for this language derived from a locally nameless representation and prove that it satisfies a number of desirable properties.We also present an implementation of our binding specification language as a GHC Haskell library implementing an embedded domain specific language (EDSL). By using Haskell type constructors to represent binding combinators, we implement the EDSL succinctly using datatype-generic programming. Our implementation supports a number of features necessary for practical programming, including flexibility in the treatment of user-defined types, besteffort name preservation (for error messages), and integration with Haskell's monad transformer library.

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