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Showing posts from March, 2012

Decidable Equality in Agda

So I've been playing with typing various things in System-F which previously I had left with auxiliary well-formedness conditions. This includes substitutions and contexts, both of which are interesting to have well typed versions of. Since I've been learning Agda, it seemed sensible to carry out this work in that language, as there is nothing like a problem to help you learn a language. In the course of proving properties, I ran into the age old problem of showing that equivalence is decidable between two objects. In this particular case, I need to be able to show the decidability of equality over types in System F in order to have formation rules for variable contexts. We'd like a context Γ to have (x:A) only if (x:B) does not occur in Γ when (A ≠ B). For us to have statements about whether two types are equal or not, we're going to need to be able to decide if that's true using a terminating procedure. And so we arrive at our story. In Coq, equality is