English

A simpler encoding of indexed types

Programming Languages 2021-07-07 v4

Abstract

In functional programming languages, generalized algebraic data types (GADTs) are very useful as the unnecessary pattern matching over them can be ruled out by the failure of unification of type arguments. In dependent type systems, this is usually called indexed types and it's particularly useful as the identity type is a special case of it. However, pattern matching over indexed types is very complicated as it requires term unification in general. We study a simplified version of indexed types (called simpler indexed types) where we explicitly specify the selection process of constructors, and we discuss its expressiveness, limitations, and properties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.15408,
  title  = {A simpler encoding of indexed types},
  author = {Tesla Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.15408},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

14 pages, 8 figures, ICFP 2021 TyDe workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:38:22.675Z