This article The purpose of this paper is to introduce b, a simply typed -calculus that supports type-based recursive definitions. Although heavily inspired from previous work by Giménez (Giménez 1998) and closely related to recent work by Amadio and Coupet (Amadio and Coupet-Grimal 1998), the technical machinery behind our system puts a slightly different emphasis on the interpretation of types. More precisely, we formalize the notion of type-based termination using a restricted form of type dependency (a.k.a. indexed types), as popularized by (Xi and Pfenning 1998; Xi and Pfenning 1999). This leads to a simple and intuitive system which is robust under several extensions, such as mutually inductive datatypes and mutually recursive function definitions; however, such extensions are not treated in the paper

The paradigm of type-based termination is explored for functional programming with recursive data types. The article introduces , a lambda-calculus with recursion, inductive types, subtyping and bounded quanti cation. Decorated type variables representing approximations of inductive types are used to track the size of function arguments and return values. The system is shown to be type safe and strongly normalizing. The main novelty is a bidirectional type checking algorithm whose soundness is established formally.