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Lambda calculus is the basis of functional programming and higher order proof assistants. However, little is known about combinatorial properties of lambda terms, in particular, about their asymptotic distribution and random generation.…
With sound unification, Definite Clause Grammars and compact expression of combinatorial generation algorithms, logic programming is shown to conveniently host a declarative playground where interesting properties and behaviors emerge from…
A natural approach to software quality assurance consists in writing unit tests securing programmer-declared code invariants. Throughout the literature a great body of work has been devoted to tools and techniques automating this…
In a paper entitled Binary lambda calculus and combinatory logic, John Tromp presents a simple way of encoding lambda calculus terms as binary sequences. In what follows, we study the numbers of binary strings of a given size that represent…
Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on petabytes of data are highly compressed repositories of a significant proportion of the knowledge accumulated and distilled so far. In this paper we study techniques to elicit this knowledge in the…
The problem we want to solve is how to generate all theorems of a given size in the implicational fragment of propositional intuitionistic linear logic. We start by filtering for linearity the proof terms associated by our Prolog-based…
We develop combinatorial test generation algorithms for progressively more powerful theorem provers, covering formula languages ranging from the implicational fragment of intuitionistic logic to full intuitionistic propositional logic. Our…
We investigate the asymptotic number of elements of size $n$ in a particular class of closed lambda-terms (so-called $BCI(p)$-terms) which are related to axiom systems of combinatory logic. By deriving a differential equation for the…
We survey several methods of generating large random lambda-terms, focusing on their closed and simply-typed variants. We discuss methods of exact- and approximate-size generation, as well as methods of achieving size-uniform and…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved notable success in code generation. However, they still frequently produce uncompilable output because their next-token inference procedure does not model formal aspects of code. Although…
In a paper entitled Binary lambda calculus and combinatory logic, John Tromp presents a simple way of encoding lambda calculus terms as binary sequences. In what follows, we study the numbers of binary strings of a given size that represent…
Prompt programming treats large language model prompts as software components with typed interfaces. Based on a literature survey of 15 recent works from 2023 to 2025, we observe a consistent trend: type systems are central to emerging…
Affine $\lambda$-terms are $\lambda$-terms in which each bound variable occurs at most once and linear $\lambda$-terms are $\lambda$-terms in which each bound variables occurs once. and only once. In this paper we count the number of closed…
Randomized higher-order computation can be seen as being captured by a lambda calculus endowed with a single algebraic operation, namely a construct for binary probabilistic choice. What matters about such computations is the probability of…
Many theories of semantic interpretation use lambda-term manipulation to compositionally compute the meaning of a sentence. These theories are usually implemented in a language such as Prolog that can simulate lambda-term operations with…
Large Language Models (LLMs) with reasoning are trained to iteratively generate and refine their answers before finalizing them, which can help with applications to mathematics and code generation. We apply code generation with reasoning…
Prompting techniques such as chain-of-thought have established themselves as a popular vehicle for improving the outputs of large language models (LLMs). For code generation, however, their exact mechanics and efficacy are under-explored.…
We address the problem of complementing higher-order patterns without repetitions of existential variables. Differently from the first-order case, the complement of a pattern cannot, in general, be described by a pattern, or even by a…
We present several results on counting untyped lambda terms, i.e., on telling how many terms belong to such or such class, according to the size of the terms and/or to the number of free variables.
Although unification can be used to implement a weak form of $\beta$-reduction, several linguistic phenomena are better handled by using some form of $\lambda$-calculus. In this paper we present a higher order feature description calculus…