A syntactic approach to eta equality in type theory

  • Authors:
  • Healfdene Goguen

  • Affiliations:
  • AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper outlines an elementary approach for showing the decidability of type checking for type theories with βη-equality, relevant to foundations for modules systems and type theory-based proof systems. The key to the approach is a syntactic translation mapping terms in the βη presentation into their full η-expansions in the β presentation. Decidability of type checking is lifted from the target β presentation to the βη presentation. The approach extends to other inductive kinds with a single constructor, and is demonstrated for singletons and dependent pairs.