## Friday, October 29, 2010

### That curious termination argument

Quick, does the SML function norm terminate on all tree-valued inputs?
  datatype tree      = Nil      | Node of tree * int * tree  fun norm Nil = Nil    | norm (Node (Nil, x, t)) =          Node (Nil, x, norm t)    | norm (Node (Node (t1, x, t2), y, t3)) =          norm (Node (t1, x, (Node (t2, y, t3))))
And if so, why?

This came from a post on the Theoretical Computer Science StackExchange asking about the theorem that, if two trees agree on their in-order traversals, then they are equivalent up to rotations. The "simple and intuitive" result mentioned in that post is a constructive proof which relies on the same termination ordering as the norm function. And it's also not terribly difficult to see why the function should terminate - it's a lexicographic termination argument: either the tree loses a node (the second case) or the tree keeps the same number of nodes and the depth of the left-most leaf decreases (the third case).

However, this sort of problem comes up not-terribly-infrequently in settings (like Agda) where termination must be established by structural induction, and the preceding argument is not structurally inductive on trees. Whenever I encounter this it always drives me crazy, so this is something of a note to myself.

## Solution

The solution that works great for this sort of function in a dependently typed language is to define a judgment over terms that captures precisely the termination ordering that we will want to consider:
  data TM {A : Set} : Tree A -> Set where    Done : TM Nil    Recurse : {x : A}{t : Tree A}       -> TM t       -> TM (Node Nil x t)    Rotate : {x y : A}{t1 t2 t3 : Tree A}        -> TM (Node t1 x (Node t2 y t3))       -> TM (Node (Node t1 x t2) y t3)

Then (and this is really the tricky part) we have to write the proof that for every tree t there is a derivaiton of TM t. The key, and the reason that I always have to bend my brain whenever I encounter a termination argument like this one, is the append helper function.
  metric : {A : Set} (t : Tree A) -> TM t  metric Nil = Done  metric (Node t1 x t2) = helper t1 (metric t2)    where      append : {A : Set}{t1 t2 : Tree A} -> TM t1 -> TM t2 -> TM (t1 ++> t2)      append Done t2 = t2      append (Recurse t1) t2 = Recurse (append t1 t2)      append (Rotate t1) t2 = Rotate (append t1 t2)      helper : {A : Set} {x : A}{t2 : Tree A}          (t1 : Tree A)          -> TM t2         -> TM (Node t1 x t2)      helper Nil tt = Recurse tt      helper (Node t1 x t2) tt = Rotate (helper t1 (append (helper t2 Done) tt))

Now it's trivial to write a version of the norm function that Agda will treat as terminating, because I just pass in an extra proof of TM t, and the proof proceeds by trivial structural induction on that proof.
  norm : {A : Set} -> Tree A -> Tree A  norm t = helper t (metric t)    where      helper : {A : Set} -> (t : Tree A) -> TM t -> Tree A      helper Nil Done = Nil       helper (Node Nil x t) (Recurse tm) =         Node Nil x (helper t tm)      helper (Node (Node t1 x t2) y t3) (Rotate tm) =          helper (Node t1 x (Node t2 y t3)) tm

The Agda code for the above is here. Are there other ways of expressing this termination argument in Agda that make as much or more sense? One approach I fiddled with was presenting a tree indexed by (1) the total number of nodes in it and (2) the depth of the left-most leaf:
  data ITree (A : Set) : NatT → NatT → Set where    Nil : ITree A Z Z    Node : ∀{total1 total2 left1 left2}       -> ITree A left1 total1        -> A        -> ITree A left2 total2       -> ITree A (1 +n left1) (1 +n (total1 +n total2))

However, due to the complexity of the dependent equality reasoning, I couldn't get Agda to believe the intuitive termination argument I presented at the beginning.

## Trees have normal forms under rotation

Once the above argument works, it's not difficult to prove the theorem mentioned on TCS StackExchange; here's the Agda proof.

[Update Nov 15, 2010] Over at reddit, Conor McBride says "When someone asks "how do I show this non-structural function terminates?", I always wonder what structurally recursive function I'd write instead." and then proceeds to answer that question by giving the appropriate structurally inductive functions grind and rot. Nice! His proof also introduces me to a new Agda built-in, rewrite, whose existence I was previously unaware of. Oh Agda release announcements, when will I learn to read you?

## Thursday, October 14, 2010

### Type Inference, In and Out of Context

Our reading group read the 2010 MSFP paper Type Inference In Context by Adam Gundry, Conor McBride, and James McKinna (ACM link). This was mostly because not all of us went to ICFP and not all of us that went to ICFP saw that MSFP talk (I was at HLPP and others were at WMM, IIRC man there are lots of acronyms in this sentence.)

Anyway, the people that went to the MSFP talk really liked the talk, so we read the paper. Some of it was confusing because state monad is not my native language. To understand it better, I re-implemented it in ML after the reading group. William and I then got into a discussion about how he had written a trying-to-be-very-clean implementation of the imperative type inference algorithm for MinML, so I adapted the algorithm further to the larger MinML language, and then adapted Williams code so that it ran in parallel with mine. And then I decided I wanted to throw the whole thing on my door as a parallel-corpus sort of thing.

The result is an impossibly sized PDF poster that I can turn into 6 tabloid sheets and put on my door, titled "Type Inference, In & Out of Context." It isn't aimed at being particularly introductory, but if you have read the MSFP paper it may be helpful as a guide to ML transfer, and I found the comparison to the imperative version of type inference quite enlightening.

There's a secondary interesting question here: what are good ways to present large pieces of literate code for dissemination? I kind of like this narrated poster form, especially for parallel corpuses, and I like literate Twelf things like the page on lax logic, but because I haven't had a lot of feedback and haven't been a reader of a lot of these sorts of things, I don't know how good I am at pulling it off. I'd appreciate feedback!

[Update Nov 18, 2010] Michael Sullivan notes that one aspect of "good ways to present large pieces of literate code" is actually providing the code so it doesn't have to be ineffectually cut and pasted from a pdf. The code is available in three files: typebase.sml (the language definition, snoc lists, and cons lists), typenoctx.sml (the imperative algorithm), and typeinctx.sml (the pure algorithm).