The significance of type theory to the theory of programming languages has long been recognized. Advances in programming languages have often derived from understanding that stems from type theory. However, these applications of type theory to practical programming languages have been indirect; the differences between practical languages and type theory have prevented direct connections between the two. This dissertation presents systematic techniques directly relating practical programming languages to type theory. These techniques allow programming languages to be interpreted in the rich mathematical domain of type theory. Such interpretations lead to semantics that are at once denotational and operational, combining the advantages of each, and they also lay the foundation for formal verification of computer programs in type theory. Previous type theories either have not provided adequate expressiveness to interpret practical languages, or have provided such expressiveness at the expense of essential features of the type theory. In particular, no previous type theory has supported a notion of partial functions (needed to interpret recursion in practical languages), and a notion of total functions and objects (needed to reason about data values), and an intrinsic notion of equality (needed for most interesting results). This dissertation presents the first type theory incorporating all three, and discusses issues arising in the design of that type theory. This type theory is used as the target of a type­theoretic semantics for a expressive programming calculus. This calculus may serve as an internal language for a variety of functional programming languages. The semantics is stated as a syntax­directed embedding of the programming calculus into type theory. A critical point arising in both the type theory and the type­theoretic semantics is the issue of admissibility. Admissibility governs what types it is legal to form recursive functions over. To build a useful type theory for partial functions it is necessary to have a wide class of admissible types. In particular, it is necessary for all the types arising in the type­theoretic semantics to be admissible. In this dissertation I present a class of admissible types that is considerably wider than any previously known class.

Abstract. In this paper we show how to extend a constructive type theory with a principle that captures the spirit of Markov’s principle from constructive recursive mathematics. Markov’s principle is especially useful for proving termination of specific computations. Allowing a limited form of classical reasoning we get more powerful resulting system which remains constructive and valid in the standard constructive semantics of a type theory. We also show that this principle can be formulated and used in a propositional fragment of a type theory.

Partial types allow the reasoning about partial functions in type theory. The partial functions of main interest are recursively computed functions, which are commonly assigned types using fixpoint induction. However, fixpoint induction is valid only on admissible types. Previous work has shown many types to be admissible, but has not shown any dependent products to be admissible. Disallowing recursion on dependent product types substantially reduces the expressiveness of the logic; for example, it prevents much reasoning about modules, objects and algebras. In this paper I present two new tools, predicate-admissibility and monotonicity, for showing types to be admissible. These tools show a wide class of types to be admissible; in particular, they show many dependent products to be admissible. This alleviates difficulties in applying partial types to theorem proving in practice. I also present a general least upper bound theorem for fixed points with regard to a computational approxim...

There are compelling benefits to using foundational type theory as a framework for programming language semantics. I give a semantics of an expressive programming calculus in the foundational type theory of Nuprl. Previous typetheoretic semantics have used less expressive type theories, or have sacrificed important programming constructs such as recursion and modules. The primary mechanisms of this semantics are partial types, for typing recursion, set types, for encoding power and singleton kinds, which are used for subtyping and module programming, and very dependent function types, for encoding signatures. Keywords Semantics, program verification, type theory, functional programming 1 INTRODUCTION Type theory has become a popular framework for formal reasoning in computer science and has formed the basis for a number of automated deduction systems, including Automath, Nuprl, HOL and Coq, among others. In addition to formalizing mathematics, these systems are widely used for the a...

The basic concepts of type theory are fundamental to computer science, logic and mathematics. Indeed, the language of type theory connects these regions of science. It plays a role in computing and information science akin to that of set theory in pure mathematics. There are many excellent accounts of the basic ideas of type theory, especially at the interface of computer science and logic — specifically, in the literature of programming languages, semantics, formal methods and automated reasoning. Most of these are very technical, dense with formulas, inference rules, and computation rules. Here we follow the example of the mathematician Paul Halmos, who in 1960 wrote a 104-page book called Naïve Set Theory intended to make the subject accessible to practicing mathematicians. His book served many generations well. This article follows the spirit of Halmos ’ book and introduces type theory without recourse to precise axioms and inference rules, and with a minimum of formalism. I start by paraphrasing the preface to Halmos ’ book. The sections of this article follow his chapters closely. Every computer scientist agrees that every computer scientist must know some type theory; the disagreement begins in trying to decide how much is some. This article contains my partial answer to that question. The purpose of the article is to tell the beginning student of advanced computer science the basic type theoretic facts of life, and to do so with a minimum of philosophical discourse and logical formalism. The point throughout is that of a prospective computer scientist eager to study programming languages, or database systems, or computational complexity theory, or distributed systems or information discovery. In type theory, “naïve ” and “formal ” are contrasting words. The present treatment might best be described as informal type theory from a naïve point of view. The concepts are very general and very abstract; therefore they may

The topic of this thesis is the extraction of efficient and readable programs from formal constructive proofs of decidability. The proof methods employed to generate the efficient code are new and result in clean and readable Nuprl extracts for two non-trivial programs. They are based on the use of Nuprl's set type and techniques for extracting efficient programs from induction principles. The constructive formal theories required to express the decidability theorems are of independent interest. They formally circumscribe the mathematical knowledge needed to understand the derived algorithms. The formal theories express concepts that are taught at the senior college level. The decidability proofs themselves, depending on this material, are of interest and are presented in some detail. The proof of decidability of classical propositional logic is relative to a semantics based on Kleene's strong three-valued logic. The constructive proof of intuitionistic decidability presented here is the first machine formalization of this proof. The exposition reveals aspects of the Nuprl tactic collection relevant to the creation of readable proofs; clear extracts and efficient code are illustrated in the discussion of the proofs.

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This article follows the spirit of Halmos' book and introduces type theory without recourse to precise axioms and inference rules, and with a minimum of formalism. I start by paraphrasing the preface to Halmos' book. The sections of this article follow his chapters closely. Every computer scientist agrees that every computer scientist must know some type theory; the disagreement begins in trying to decide how much is some. This article contains my partial answer to that question. The purpose of the article is to tell the beginning student of advanced computer science the basic type theoretic facts of life, and to do so with a minimum of philosophical discourse and logical formalism. The point throughout is that of a prospective computer scientist eager to study programming languages, or database systems, or computational complexity theory, or distributed systems or information discovery

Reection is the ability of a deductive system to internalize aspects of its own structure and thereby reason to some extent about itself. In this paper we present a theoretical framework for exploring reection in type theories that use the \Propositions-as-Types" principle, such as Martin-Lof style theories. One of the main results is that it is unnecessary to build a complete Godel style \reection" layer on top of the logical theory. This makes it possible to use our framework for an ecient implementation of reection in theorem provers for such type theories. We are doing this for the NuPRL and MetaPRL systems.

The topic of this thesis is the extraction of efficient and readable programs from formal constructive proofs of decidability. The proof methods employed to generate the efficient code are new and result in clean and readable Nuprl extracts for two non-trivial programs. They are based on the use of Nuprl’s set type and techniques for extracting efficient programs from induction principles. The constructive formal theories required to express the decidability theorems are of independent interest. They formally circumscribe the mathematical knowledge needed to understand the derived algorithms. The formal theories express concepts that are taught at the senior college level. The decidability proofs themselves, depending on this material, are of interest and are presented in some detail. The proof of decidability of classical propositional logic is relative to a semantics based on Kleene’s strong three-valued logic. The constructive proof of intuitionistic decidability presented here is the first machine formalization of this proof. Theexposition reveals aspects of the Nuprl tactic collection relevant to the creation of readable proofs; clear extracts and efficient code are illustrated in the discussion of the proofs. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH James Caldwell was born September 25, 1956. The earliest manifestation of the impulse to create something permanent occurred about 1961 when he discovered a bag of concrete mix in the woods and, dragging it to a nearby stream, tore it open, and added water, building his first site sculpture. To his own amazement, the sculpture was still extant in 1962. He graduated from Clarkstown High School in New City, New York in 1974 and attended the State University of New York Cortland, studying painting with Jim Thorpe. In 1976, on the recommendation of his mentors, Caldwell moved to New York City to study in the Empire State College studio art program run by