Direct Foundations for Compositional Programming

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new type-directed operational semantics for Fi+ that supports recursion and impredicative polymorphism, simplifying proofs and bridging the gap between theoretical foundations and practical implementation of the CP language.

Contribution

It extends the TDOS approach to model the full Fi+ calculus, eliminating the need for complex coherence proofs and supporting features like recursion and impredicative polymorphism.

Findings

TDOS supports full Fi+ calculus with polymorphism and recursion

Simplifies proofs by establishing determinism of semantics

Formalized in Coq, validating the approach

Abstract

The recently proposed CP language adopts Compositional Programming: a new modular programming style that solves challenging problems such as the Expression Problem. CP is implemented on top of a polymorphic core language with disjoint intersection types called Fi+. The semantics of Fi+ employs an elaboration to a target language and relies on a sophisticated proof technique to prove the coherence of the elaboration. Unfortunately, the proof technique is technically challenging and hard to scale to many common features, including recursion or impredicative polymorphism. Thus, the original formulation of Fi+ does not support the two later features, which creates a gap between theory and practice, since CP fundamentally relies on them. This paper presents a new formulation of Fi+ based on a type-directed operational semantics (TDOS). The TDOS approach was recently proposed to model the semantics of languages with disjoint intersection types (but without polymorphism). Our work shows that the TDOS approach can be extended to languages with disjoint polymorphism and model the full Fi+ calculus. Unlike the elaboration semantics, which gives the semantics to Fi+ indirectly via a target language, the TDOS approach gives a semantics to Fi+ directly. With a TDOS, there is no need for a coherence proof. Instead, we can simply prove that the semantics is deterministic. The proof of determinism only uses simple reasoning techniques, such as straightforward induction, and is able to handle problematic features such as recursion and impredicative polymorphism. This removes the gap between theory and practice and validates the original proofs of correctness for CP. We formalized the TDOS variant of the Fi+ calculus and all its proofs in the Coq proof assistant.