The goal of the Ynot project is to make programming with dependent types practical for a modern programming language. In particular, we are extending the Coq proof assistant to make it possible to write higher-order, imperative and concurrent programs (in the style of Haskell) through a shallow embedding of Hoare Type Theory (HTT). HTT provides a clean separation between pure and effectful computations, makes it possible to formally specify and reason about effects, and is fully compositional. more...
Simpler, Easier! In a recent paper, Simply Easy! (An Implementation of a Dependently Typed Lambda Calculus), the authors argue that type checking a dependently typed language is easy. I agree whole-heartedly, it doesn't have to be difficult at all. But I don't think the paper presents the easiest way to do it. So here is my take on how to write a simple dependent type checker. (There's nothing new here, and the authors of the paper are undoubtedly familiar with all of it.) First, the untyped lambda calculus. I'll start by implementing the untyped lambda calculus. It's a very simple language with just three constructs: variables, applications, and lambda expressions, i.e.,