Selected Papers of the Conference "Typed Lambda Calculi and Applications 2007"

2007 Editors: Simona Ronchi Della Rocca


1. The Safe Lambda Calculus

William Blum ; C. -H. Luke Ong.
Safety is a syntactic condition of higher-order grammars that constrains occurrences of variables in the production rules according to their type-theoretic order. In this paper, we introduce the safe lambda calculus, which is obtained by transposing (and generalizing) the safety condition to the setting of the simply-typed lambda calculus. In contrast to the original definition of safety, our calculus does not constrain types (to be homogeneous). We show that in the safe lambda calculus, there is no need to rename bound variables when performing substitution, as variable capture is guaranteed not to happen. We also propose an adequate notion of beta-reduction that preserves safety. In the same vein as Schwichtenberg's 1976 characterization of the simply-typed lambda calculus, we show that the numeric functions representable in the safe lambda calculus are exactly the multivariate polynomials; thus conditional is not definable. We also give a characterization of representable word functions. We then study the complexity of deciding beta-eta equality of two safe simply-typed terms and show that this problem is PSPACE-hard. Finally we give a game-semantic analysis of safety: We show that safe terms are denoted by `P-incrementally justified strategies'. Consequently pointers in the game semantics of safe lambda-terms are only necessary from order 4 onwards.

2. On tiered small jump operators

Jean-Yves Marion.
Predicative analysis of recursion schema is a method to characterize complexity classes like the class FPTIME of polynomial time computable functions. This analysis comes from the works of Bellantoni and Cook, and Leivant by data tiering. Here, we refine predicative analysis by using a ramified Ackermann's construction of a non-primitive recursive function. We obtain a hierarchy of functions which characterizes exactly functions, which are computed in O(n^k) time over register machine model of computation. For this, we introduce a strict ramification principle. Then, we show how to diagonalize in order to obtain an exponential function and to jump outside deterministic polynomial time. Lastly, we suggest a dependent typed lambda-calculus to represent this construction.

3. The Omega Rule is $\mathbf{\Pi_{1}^{1}}$-Complete in the $\lambda\beta$-Calculus

Benedetto Intrigila ; Richard Statman.
In a functional calculus, the so called \Omega-rule states that if two terms P and Q applied to any closed term <i>N</i> return the same value (i.e. PN = QN), then they are equal (i.e. P = Q holds). As it is well known, in the \lambda\beta-calculus the \Omega-rule does not hold, even when the \eta-rule (weak extensionality) is added to the calculus. A long-standing problem of H. Barendregt (1975) concerns the determination of the logical power of the \Omega-rule when added to the \lambda\beta-calculus. In this paper we solve the problem, by showing that the resulting theory is \Pi\_{1}^{1}-complete.

4. Polynomial Size Analysis of First-Order Shapely Functions

Olha Shkaravska ; Marko van Eekelen ; Ron van Kesteren.
We present a size-aware type system for first-order shapely function definitions. Here, a function definition is called shapely when the size of the result is determined exactly by a polynomial in the sizes of the arguments. Examples of shapely function definitions may be implementations of matrix multiplication and the Cartesian product of two lists. The type system is proved to be sound w.r.t. the operational semantics of the language. The type checking problem is shown to be undecidable in general. We define a natural syntactic restriction such that the type checking becomes decidable, even though size polynomials are not necessarily linear or monotonic. Furthermore, we have shown that the type-inference problem is at least semi-decidable (under this restriction). We have implemented a procedure that combines run-time testing and type-checking to automatically obtain size dependencies. It terminates on total typable function definitions.

5. Continuation-Passing Style and Strong Normalisation for Intuitionistic Sequent Calculi

Jose Espirito Santo ; Ralph Matthes ; Luis Pinto.
The intuitionistic fragment of the call-by-name version of Curien and Herbelin's \lambda\_mu\_{\~mu}-calculus is isolated and proved strongly normalising by means of an embedding into the simply-typed lambda-calculus. Our embedding is a continuation-and-garbage-passing style translation, the inspiring idea coming from Ikeda and Nakazawa's translation of Parigot's \lambda\_mu-calculus. The embedding strictly simulates reductions while usual continuation-passing-style transformations erase permutative reduction steps. For our intuitionistic sequent calculus, we even only need "units of garbage" to be passed. We apply the same method to other calculi, namely successive extensions of the simply-typed &lambda;-calculus leading to our intuitionistic system, and already for the simplest extension we consider (&lambda;-calculus with generalised application), this yields the first proof of strong normalisation through a reduction-preserving embedding. The results obtained extend to second and higher-order calculi.

6. Observational Equivalence and Full Abstraction in the Symmetric Interaction Combinators

Damiano Mazza.
The symmetric interaction combinators are an equally expressive variant of Lafont's interaction combinators. They are a graph-rewriting model of deterministic computation. We define two notions of observational equivalence for them, analogous to normal form and head normal form equivalence in the lambda-calculus. Then, we prove a full abstraction result for each of the two equivalences. This is obtained by interpreting nets as certain subsets of the Cantor space, called edifices, which play the same role as Boehm trees in the theory of the lambda-calculus.