Types: Checking some program invariants statically

Note

This section was written after the fact. We did types in class but these notes were written up later. It is also currently incomplete and to be considered a “work in progress”.

In this section, we build on the notion of “goals” discussed in the section on Alternative application semantics and use the notions of unification and goals to understand how we can express some invariants of our programs that can be checked before we run them. We’ll use Prolog here because it simplifies the discussion. We’ll also restrict ourselves to talking about the “arithmetic expressions” language and leave extensions to your own efforts.

Pure arithmetic expressions

First off, if we only talk about arithmetic expressions sans function application, there is little for us to check, since every expression we can compose using our add, sub and mul operations is guaranteed to produce a number as a result. So our type checker for that restricted language would look like this -

:- module(typecheck, [exprtype/2]).

% num(X) is a num as long as X is a number.
exprtype(num(X), num) :-
    number(X).

% add(A,B) is a num as long as both A and B are num.
exprtype(add(A,B), num) :-
    exprtype(A, num),
    exprtype(B, num).

exprtype(sub(A,B), num) :-
    exprtype(A, num),
    exprtype(B, num).

exprtype(mul(A,B), num) :-
    exprtype(A, num),
    exprtype(B, num).

We use the Prolog built-in predicate number(X) which succeeds if the given X happens to be a number and fails otherwise. So, we can use the above type checker to validate any arithmetic expression we can write for our simple arithmetic language.

A few observations are in order -

1. The type checker already looks like it is “interpreting” the expression but just stopping short of calculation. i.e. it has a structure that closely mimics our interpreter for the language.

2. The type-checking of add, sub and mul are indistinguishable and can be replaced by a common predicate –

   binoptype(A, B, num) :-
       exprtype(A, num),
       exprtype(B, num).
   

   i.e. when we write add(A,B), we already know that the A and B terms must evaluate to numbers.

When we introduce functions

Things get interesting when we introduce functions and function application in our language. As we know, this adds three new terms to our language –

1. We need a term to hold a symbol or “identifier” – id.

2. We need a term using which we can express a “function”. This term won’t evaluate to a number. It will evaluate to a “function value”.

3. We need a term for applying a function value to an argument to produce a result.

With the above additions, our type checker now becomes –

:- module(typecheck, [exprtype/3]).

exprtype(_, num(X), num) :-
    number(X).

exprtype(Env, add(A,B), num) :-
    exprtype(Env, A, num),
    exprtype(Env, B, num).

exprtype(Env, sub(A,B), num) :-
    exprtype(Env, A, num),
    exprtype(Env, B, num).

exprtype(Env, mul(A,B), num) :-
    exprtype(Env, A, num),
    exprtype(Env, B, num).

% id(X) is of type Ty if a binding X = Ty exists in the environment.
exprtype(Env, id(X), Ty) :-
    atom(X),
    member(X = Ty, Env).

% A fun(...) expression is of type fun(ArgTy, BodyTy)
% if its argument is of type ArgTy and its body is of type
% BodyTy given occurrences of the argument in the body
% are consistent with the type of the argument being ArgTy.
exprtype(Env, fun(ArgSym, ArgTy, Body, BodyTy), fun(ArgTy, BodyTy)) :-
    exprtype([ArgSym = ArgTy|Env], Body, BodyTy).

% Applying a function Fun to an Arg produces a value of type ResultTy
% if Arg's type is ArgTy and the body type of the function is ResultTy
% given the argument type.
exprtype(Env, apply(Fun, Arg), ResultTy) :-
    exprtype(Env, Arg, ArgTy),
    exprtype(Env, Fun, fun(ArgTy, ResultTy)).

Note

Notice how we exploit the ideas of unification and conjunctions to describe the type structure of programs in our mini language.

Functions introduce the notion of “identifiers” in our language and therefore any sub term can be one of the following types –

1. A number, which we denote using the atom num.

2. A function or “closure”, whose type we denote using the term fun(ArgTy, BodyTy). So the full type description of a function includes the type of its argument and the type of its result.

3. Similar to our interpreter, we use an “environment” to keep track of the types of “identifier” sub-expressions. In this case, we bind our identifiers to type terms in contrast to using the environment to bind identifiers to values when we interpret the expression.

Typing conditional expressions

When we introduce booleans, comparisons and conditionals into our language, our type system needs to correspondingly grow.

exprtype(_, true, bool).
exprtype(_, false, bool).
exprtype(Env, equal(A,B), bool) :-
    exprtype(Env, A, num),
    exprtype(Env, B, num).
exprtype(Env, less(A,B), bool) :-
    exprtype(Env, A, num),
    exprtype(Env, B, num).
exprtype(Env, and(A,B), bool) :-
    exprtype(Env, A, bool),
    exprtype(Env, B, bool).
exprtype(Env, or(A,B), bool) :-
    exprtype(Env, A, bool),
    exprtype(Env, B, bool).
exprtype(Env, not(A), bool) :-
    exprtype(Env, A, bool).

In the above formulation, we had a choice of how to represent booleans. We chose to be explicit about them and prevented numbers and functions from being interpreted as boolean. Untyped Scheme/Racket, for example, has the notion of “generalized booleans” where any value that is not #f is taken to be “true” when used in a boolean context.

… but how would we type a conditional expression if(Cond,Then,Else) ? What if the Then part is of one type and the Else part is of another type? We have some choices to make here –

1. We can constrain the expression to be such that the Then and Else parts must be of the same type. This is a common strategy in many languages (especially functional statically checked ones) and very viable for most programs, given a rich type system.

2. We introduce the notion of “union types” in our type system and type the if expression as the union of the types of the Then part and the Else part.

The second option is a substantial addition to our type system, so we’ll take the simpler route here initially until we understand more.

exprtype(Env, if(Cond,Then,Else), Ty) :-
    exprtype(Env, Cond, bool),
    exprtype(Env, Then, Ty),
    exprtype(Env, Else, Ty).

Recursive functions

Consider the expression –

apply(fun(x, XTy1, apply(id(x), id(x)), BTy1), fun(x, XTy2, apply(id(x), id(x)), BTy2))

Before we ask the question of what type should this expression be, what should we be passing in in place of the variables XTy1, XTy2, BTy1 and BTy2?

We know that the type of an expression of the form fun(X,Xty,B,Bty) is fun(XTy,BTy). We can therefore consider – XTy1 = fun(XTy2, BTy2). Since we’re “applying” X to itself, we also have XTy2 = fun(XTy2, BTy2). So we’re justified in saying XTy1 = XTy2 and similarly BTy1 = BTy2. So let’s use that to simplify our expression –

apply(fun(x, XTy, apply(id(x), id(x)), BTy), fun(x, XTy, apply(id(x), id(x)), BTy))

… and we have XTy = fun(XTy, BTy). Wait a sec now! What is the XTy on the right side supposed to be? If we expand using the equation, we’ll need to keep expanding forever, as –

fun(XTy, BTy)
-> fun(fun(XTy, BTy), BTy)
-> fun(fun(fun(XTy, BTy), BTy), BTy)
...

When we dealt with structural unification, we forbid such unifications by using an occurs? check that checks whether a variable being unified with a structure does not itself occur within the structure for this reason. So We cannot type such a program in our language at this point. An important result to note here since we cannot type recursion in our system is that every expression that has a type in our language is guaranteed to terminate after a finite number of steps. This property is called strong normalization.

Exercise

This notion of “strong normalization” sounds like a very limited thing. Are languages with this property useful? For one thing they aren’t Turing complete. Can you think of situations where it is very useful to know that a program will terminate before you actually run it?

However, we also have some experience dealing with this kind of an equation. We’re trying to solve the equation XTy = fun(XTy, BTy) for XTy, given arbitrary BTy.

solve(XTy, BTy) :-
    XTy = fun(XTy, BTy).

If we took our strict notion of unification, this would cause our type checker to fail. Prolog, however, permits this unification by solving the equation for us. You can imagine Prolog solving it for us like how we solved recursion for functions using name binding, or using recursion combinators in lambda calculus.

One way we can avoid relying on this special property of Prolog, is to add an explicit “recursive function” term in our language, where the body of the recursive function may refer to the function itself by name.

exprtype(Env, rec(Fname, Arg, ArgTy, Body, BodyTy), fun(ArgTy, BodyTy)) :-
    exprtype([Arg = ArgTy, Fname = fun(ArgTy, BodyTy) | Env], Body, BodyTy).

This is certainly not a general notion of recursion, but is useful enough for many cases such as looping and we’re now not relying on Prolog’s ability to solve that recursive unification for us.

Types and mutation

Introducing sequenced computation in our language and a corresponding notion of “mutation of variables” would introduce an additional complexity to our type system.

What would be the type of the identifier x in –

seq(set(id(x), 3), set(id(x), false))

Should the identifier x be of type num or bool? This gets more complicated if the two set mutations happen in different branches of a conditional.

A simple way this is resolved in statically typed languages is to say that an identifier has to have a fixed type in its scope and therefore cause the above sequencing operation to fail the type check.

Type soundness

Our type checker predicate exprtype is making a prediction about what will happen when we run our program on actual values. How do we know this function does not lie? – i.e. how do we know that if our type checker tells us that the type of an expression is T, then when we evaluate the expression using our interpreter we’ll certainly get a value of type T?

This property of a type system is called “soundness” – i.e. a type system is said to be sound if the the type computed by the type checker is guaranteed to be the type of an expression when it eventually gets evaluated.

Proving that a type system is sound is done in a series of alternating steps called progress and preservation. “Progress” is the statement that when we know the type of an expression, we can execute one step of computation. In the “preservation” step, we prove that the type computed earlier is indeed the type produced. With a series of alternating progress and preservation steps, we can therefore prove (or disprove) that a type system is sound.

Question

Is there a use for unsound type systems? Do you know of programming languages that have a type system that is not sound?

Note that when dealing with a typed programming language, there is an implicit assumption about a set of known exceptional conditions that can occur, such as program non-termination, runtime check failures and such. Therefore soundness goes along with consideration for such exceptional conditions that a programmer needs to accept can occur.

A taste of type inference

So far, in our language, we’ve given the types of arguments and results of our functions explicitly and checked these against usage. Specifying types explicitly like this is good discipline, but we can let the computer do much of this checking work for us.

In many circumstances, we can infer, for example, the argument type of a function by looking at the context in which it is being used.

Let us say we introduce another kind of term in our language – the “function whose arg and body types are inferred from context”.

exprtype(Env, funinf(Arg, Body), fun(ArgTy, BodyTy)) :-
    %....what goes here?

For one thing, we can perhaps infer ArgTy from the body based on usage.

exprtype(Env, funinf(Arg, Body), fun(ArgTy, BodyTy)) :-
    exprtype([Arg = ArgTy|Env], Body, BodyTy).
    %....anything else needed?

Supposing we have a function funinf(x, add(id(x), id(x))), querying exprtype(Env, funinf(x, add(id(x), id(x))), FunTy) will result in FunTy = fun(num, num), thanks to Prolog’s unification and goal search mechanisms.

In fact, much of what we’ve been writing so far already can do some inference for us because we’ve embedded it in Prolog where unification and goal search are built-in.

So, given that we have operations such as add, or and equal whose types are well known, we can completely dispense with explicitly specifying types in our system and rely on such inference. i.e. We can simply express our functions as fun(ArgSym, Body) and use the goal search mechanism –

exprtype(Env, fun(ArgSym, Body), fun(ArgTy, BodyTy)) :-
    exprtype([ArgSym = ArgTy|Env], Body, BodyTy).

The above goal is saying “Find some ArgTy and BodyTy such that if you place ArgSym = ArgTy in the environment, the body of the function checks out to be of type BodyTy. In fact, we needn’t have made any modification to our type checker to do such inference if we permitted the use of Prolog variables when we constructed our function term. So instead of saying fun(x, num, add(id(x), id(x)), num), all we needed to say was fun(x, XTy, add(id(x), id(x)), RTy) and our type checker would’ve told us what XTy and RTy should be when we query exprtype(Env, fun(x, XTy, add(id(x), id(x)), RTy), fun(XTy, RTy)).

So even with just what we had earlier, you can do a query like – exprtype([], fun(x, apply(id(x),num(4))), T), which will succeed with T = fun(fun(num, _A), _A). Notice how SWI-Prolog gives a variable in place of the result type of the function. If you try exprtype([], fun(x, id(x)), T), you’ll similarly get T = fun(_A, _A), which makes sense as the identity function must have the same type for input and result.

We therefore have some minimal polymorphism implemented in our type system (as implemented in our checker) already, though our programs don’t yet support explicit polymorphism. For that, we need to enrich the type system with types like “Listof A”.

Exercise

Work out how the above implementation can compute the type of a function argument based on how the argument ends up being used in the function body. Where can such a type inference fail? Is it possible for more than one solution to the goal search to turn up? How and when? Would this goal search process terminate always?

Parametric polymorphism

Consider a function that always evaluates to the number 42 in our language. We could write such a function as fun(x, num, num(42), num). However, since it is a “constant”, we don’t really care about the type of the argument. How can we express the notion of “this function can work no matter what type of argument you give it”? While we’re using a trivial example here to introduce the idea, this is a very common requirement when dealing with many functions.

For example, “addition” as a function can basically say “give me any two things that can be added and I’ll add them”. This would work for integers, floating point numbers, complex number and even equal length vectors of numbers.

While addition seems specific to “things that can be added”, there are still functions like map which can apply arbitrary functions to elements of a sequence without caring about what specific type they are, as long as some structural constraints are met. For map, for example, we say that it has the type -

map :: (a -> b) -> Listof a -> Listof b

… where a and b are “type variables”. Parametric polymorphism combined with type inference can be a very powerful way to check correctness of our programs and makes for a rich language.

… to be continued …