Engineering Commons^™

Irrelevance, Polymorphism, And Erasure In Type Theory, Richard Nathan Mishra-Linger

Dissertations and Theses

Dependent type theory is a proven technology for verified functional programming in which programs and their correctness proofs may be developed using the same rules in a single formal system. In practice, large portions of programs developed in this way have no computational relevance to the ultimate result of the program and should therefore be removed prior to program execution. In previous work on identifying and removing irrelevant portions of programs, computational irrelevance is usually treated as an intrinsic property of program expressions. We find that such an approach forces programmers to maintain two copies of commonly used datatypes: a …