October 17th, 2023
The computational view of intuitionistic dependent type theory is as an intrinsic logic of (functional) 
programs in which types are viewed as specifications of their behavior. Equational reasoning is particularly relevant in the functional case, where correctness can be formulated as equality between two implementations of the same behavior. Besides behavior, it is also important to specify and verify the cost of programs, measured in terms of their resource usage, with respect to both sequential and parallel evaluation. Although program cost can—and has been—verified in type theory using an extrinsic formulation of programs as data objects, what we seek here is, instead, an intrinsic account within type theory itself.
In this talk we discuss Calf, the Cost-Aware Logical Framework, which is an extension of dependent call-by-push-value type theory that provides an intrinsic account of both parallel and sequential resource usage for a variety of problem-specific measures of cost. Thus, for example, it is possible to prove that insertion sort and merge sort are equal as regards behavior, but differ in terms of the number of comparisons required to achieve the same results. But how can equal functions have different cost? To provide an intrinsic account of both intensional and extensional properties of programs, we make use of Sterling’s notion of Synthetic Tait Computability, a generalization of Tait’s method originally developed for the study of higher type theory.
In STC the concept of a “phase” plays a central role: originally as the distinction between the syntactic and semantic aspects of a computability structure, but more recently applied to the formulation of type theories for program modules and for information flow properties of programs. In Calf we distinguish two phases, the intensional and extensional, which differ as regards the significance of cost accounting—extensionally it is neglected, intensionally it is of paramount importance. Thus, in the extensional phase insertion sort and merge sort are equal, but in the intensional phase they are distinct, and indeed one is proved to have optimal behavior as regards comparisons, and the other not. Importantly, both phases are needed in a cost verification—the proof of the complexity of an algorithm usually relies on aspects of its correctness.
Robert Harper’s home page (Carnegie Mellon University)
