Sized types are a modular and theoretically well-understood tool for checking termination of recursive and productivity of corecursive definitions. The essential idea is to track structural descent and guardedness in the type system to make termination checking robust and suitable for strong abstractions like higher-order functions and polymorphism. To study the application of sized types to proof assistants and programming languages based on dependent type theory, we have implemented a core language, MiniAgda, with explicit handling of sizes. New considerations were necessary to soundly integrate sized types with dependencies and pattern matching, which was made possible by modern concepts such as inaccessible patterns and parametric function spaces. This paper provides an introduction to MiniAgda by example and informal explanations of the underlying principles. 1

Abstract. A type-based approach to termination uses sized types: an ordinal bound for the size of a data structure is stored in its type. A recursive function over a sized type is accepted if it is visible in the type system that recursive calls occur just at a smaller size. This approach is only sound if the type of the recursive function is admissible, i.e., depends on the size index in a certain way. To explore the space of admissible functions in the presence of higher-kinded data types and impredicative polymorphism, a semantics is developed where sized types are interpreted as functions from ordinals into sets of strongly normalizing terms. It is shown that upper semi-continuity of such functions is a sufficient semantical criterion for admissibility. To provide a syntactical criterion, a calculus for semi-continuous function is developed. 1