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Fist things, first…

Since I’m spending some time writing Agda code, I’ve decided to write a port of Connor’s talk Developing Dependently Typed Programs in LEGO to Agda. I hope that this should help me to understand dependently typed tricks used by McBride and also could help others to understand and use Agda.

The complete code for this tutorial series will be avaliable in the following github repo.

With proper references done, let’s get our hands dirty and write some cool dependently typed code!

Installation prerequisites.

From this point, I’ll assume that you have installed Agda and its emacs mode (trust me, you must use emacs). The best way to install Agda is using cabal:

cabal update cabal install agda agda-mode setup

The last step should configure agda-mode in your emacs instalation putting some elisp code in your .emacs config file. If have some trouble in installing Agda, the best place to solve these is Agda’s freenode channel.

I’ll also assume that you read the following guide to edit and compile Agda code.

What we will do?

When we start to learn a dependently typed language one of the very first examples that we must do is to prove that addition over natural numbers is a commutative operation. So, in this post, I’ll introduce features of Agda in order to prove this property.

In Connor’s talk, he shows how to define natural numbers and its induction principle. In order to stay consistent with our objective to port this talk, I’ll do the same here and then prove that addition is commutative.

Representing natural numbers

We will represent natural numbers using a Agda data type to encode Peano notation, as follows:

Note that Agda supports unicode characters and its syntax is inspired by Haskell’s. So, data type definitions in Agda will look quite the same as Haskell’s GADT’s (Generalized Algebraic Data Types).

Using the previously defined type, we can represent the n-th natural number by n-sucs followed by a zero. For exemple, the number 2 is represented as suc (suc zero). Of course, writing suc’s to represent numbers, isn’t a good idea. In order to avoid this kind of suc‘hell, Agda provide some pragmas that allow us to write arabic numbers instead of sequences of type suc’s and zero.

Induction over natural numbers

Every kid learns on its discrete math course that induction on natural numbers is the way one should use to prove $\forall n. P (n)$, where $n$ is a natural number. Intuitively, induction says that if you can prove that a property P is true for $0$ and if can prove that this same property is true for $(n + 1)$ using the fact that $P(n)$ is true, then it is the case that $\forall n. P(n)$ holds. This fact is expressed by the following formula of logic:

Thanks to Curry-Howard correspondence, we can write a simple function that corresponds to the induction principle for natural numbers. In fact, this function represents the way we can define functions by structural recursion over natural numbers.

Below, I present the definition of ℕ-Elim in Agda’s notation:

The type of ℕ-Elim is just a encoding of the induction principle for natural numbers in Agda syntax. It’s definition is made by pattern matching on n, the natural number bound in the conclusion P n and the definition of each equation have no surprises.

Definition of natural number addition

We can define addition over natural numbers by structural recursion over its first parameter:

We can also define addition using ℕ-Elim:

The idea of the last definition is quite simple. The first parameter of ℕ-Elim is a function that takes a natural number and returns a type. So, in order to define addition, we pass a function that always return type ℕ: (λ _ → ℕ). The second parameter is the value that is returned when recursion reaches zero: m and the third argument is a function to represent how to combine the recursive call of ℕ-Elim: we just use suc constructor. Finally, the last parameter is the natural number that we will recurse on: n.

If the reader is a skeptical persion, like me, you are probably asking: “These definitions really define the same function?”. The answer is yes and we will prove this. But first we must take a little break and talk about equality in type theory.

A Little Digression: Equality

Equality is a very contentious subject in type theory, because there at least 2 definitions of equality and the way the they interact with each other is one of the aspects that we must understand in order to use type theory based proof assistants (or dependently-typed languages).

We will briefly talk about two equality definitions: the definitional equality and propositional equality. The definitional equality is the equality used by the type checker to assert that two things are equal (of course, things are considered equal up to variable renaming). To check equality, type checkers reduce terms to their repective normal forms and, then compare for equality. So, definitional equality is strong connected with reduction, since in order to check that two terms are equal, some reduction may be necessary. This is one of the reasons why Agda (and other similar languages) impose restrictions in order to ensure totality of definitions, since partial ones does not guarantee that reduction behave well and always terminates. Since definitional equality is used internally by the type checker, we cannot use it in our code to express a type that says these two terms are equal. In order to do that, we can define a data type that represents proofs of equality:

The equality type only has one constructor: refl, which says that a value x is only equal to itself. How this could be useful? The point is that propositional equality is an evidence of definitional equality. Consider the following example:

Definition test1 is a proof that the equality 2 + 2 ≡ 4 holds. How this happens? The point is that in order to assert that the terms on both sides of the equality are the same in order to use the constructor refl, the type checker must reduce 2 + 2, which is obviously equal to 4.

Some properties of equality, like symmetry, transitivity and congruence are easily stated as Agda functions:

In order to make equality proofs more readable, Agda programmers usually define operators to resemble paper-and-pencil like chain based equality proofs. Here is a possible definition of such operators:

With this, we have the tools needed to finish our job: 1) prove that the two definitions of addition are equivalente and, 2) prove that addition is a commutative operation.

Proving the equivalence of addition definitions

After this digression on equality, we can go back to our regular schedule and prove that our two definitions of addition are equivalent. This property can be stated as:

Using emacs Agda mode facilities, we can do a case split on n getting:

and, since the first equation holds definitionally, constructor refl finishes its definition.

but in the suc n equation, we got stuck… This stuckness is due to the lack of reduction on expression suc n '+ m. In order to convince the type checker that suc n '+ m is the same as suc (n '+ m), we must prove a simple lemma:

Now, our equivalence proof can be finished using this lemma:

Pretty unreadable, huh? Using equality chain combinators we can do better:

With the first mission done, let us prove that addition is commutative.

Proving commutativity of addition

To prove that addition is commutative we will proceed by induction over the recursive argument of addition. To do it, we just make a case split over n, getting:

Now, agda leave us with the following types in the holes:

for each hole we will state and prove a lemma. Note that, due to the way addition was defined, we do not have definitionally that n + 0 = n. This is because addition was defined by recursion over its first argument, so Agda cannot reduce n+ 0 to n. In order to get the desired equality, we need to do a simple inductive proof:

The next proof is necessary in order to conclude the second goal:

Now, the commutativity of addition is a simple matter of glue the previous lemmas:

and this finishes the prove that addition is a commutative operation.

Finishing up

This concludes the first post of my version of Developing Dependently Typed Programs in Agda. I hope this post has motivated the reader to continue their journey in learning Agda. See you on the next post!

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