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Showing posts from May, 2007

The type says everything

I've mentioned a number of times that given a sufficiently rich type theory we can use the type to provide a specification for the function, such that the function is correct by construction. I'd like to give a simple example of how this works in the Coq proof assistant. The following code is an illustration of how the type theory of Coq allows you to fully specify the behaviour of functions. Kragen Sitaker made the comment that there weren't too many reasonable interpretations of the function of the type given to the assoc function: A -> list (A * B) -> option B that is, a function taking an element of type A, a list of pairs of A and B, to the possibility of a B (and possible failure). That got me wondering how hard it would be to tighten the noose so that there was only one way to interpret the type but still possibly many implementations that satisfy the type, all of which will yield the same result. The following code illustrates that this is indeed p