Principality of typings is the property that for each typable term, there is a typing from which all other typings are obtained via some set of operations. Type inference is the problem of finding a typing for a given term, if possible. We define an intersection type system which has principal typings and types exactly the strongly normalizable -terms. More interestingly, every finite-rank restriction of this system (using Leivant's first notion of rank) has principal typings and also has decidable type inference. This is in contrast to System F where the finite rank restriction for every finite rank at 3 and above has neither principal typings nor decidable type inference. This is also in contrast to earlier presentations of intersection types where the status (decidable or undecidable) of these properties is unknown for the finiterank restrictions at 3 and above. Furthermore, the notion of principal typings for our system involves only one operation, substitution, rather than severa...

Principality of typings is the property that for each typable term, there is a typing from which all other typings are obtained via some set of operations. Type inference is the problem of finding a typing for a given term, if possible. We define an intersection type system which has principal typings and types exactly the strongly normalizable #-terms. More interestingly, every finite-rank restriction of this system (using Leivant's first notion of rank) has principal typings and also has decidable type inference.

The λ-calculus with de Bruijn indices assembles each α-class of λ-terms in a unique term, using indices instead of variable names. Intersection types provide finitary type polymorphism and can characterise normalisable λ-terms, that is a term is normalisable if and only if it is typeable. To be closer to computations and to simplify the formalisation of the atomic operations involved in β-contractions several calculi of explicit substitution were developed and some of them are written with de Bruijn indices. Versions of explicit substitutions calculi without types and with simple type systems are well investigated in contrast to versions with more elaborated type systems such as intersection types. In previous work, we introduced a de Bruijn version of the λ-calculus with an intersection type system and proved it preserves the subject reduction, a basic type system property. In this paper a version with de Bruijn indices of an intersection type system originally introduced to characterise principal typings for β-normal forms (β-nf for short) is presented. We present the characterisation in this new system and the corresponding versions for the type inference and the reconstruction of normal forms from principal typings algorithms. We briefly discuss about the failure of the subject reduction property and some possible solutions for it. ∗ Supported by a PhD scholarship at the Universidade de Brasília. † Supported by the Fundação de Apoio à Pesquisa do Distrito Federal [FAPDF 8-004/2007] 1 1