Practical Subtyping for System F with Sized (Co-)Induction

Abstract

We present a rich type system with subtyping for an extension of System F. Our type constructors include sum and product types, universal and existential quantifiers, inductive and coinductive types. The latter two may carry annotations allowing the encoding of size invariants that are used to ensure the termination of recursive programs. For example, the termination of quicksort can be derived by showing that partitioning a list does not increase its size. The system deals with complex programs involving mixed induction and coinduction, or even mixed polymorphism and (co-)induction (as for Scottencoded data types). One of the key ideas is to completely separate the notion of size from recursion. We do not check the termination of programs directly, but rather show that their (circular) typing proofs are well-founded. We then obtain termination using a standard semantic proof of normalisation. To demonstrate the practicality of our system, we provide an implementation which accepts all the examples discussed in the paper.