Agda is a dependently typed programming language. I’ve read about dependent types on and off for the past few years in magazine articles as well as discussed them a little with my collaborator Dan Ghica and others, but never really had the time to properly experiment until this Easter holiday. This book – by Aaron Stump – is interesting because it’s basic, practical, and jumps right into coding. I thought it would be good for someone like me who wants to play with the practice of dependent types and only delve into theoretical concerns as necessary or motivated to do so.

The book comes with its own Agda library, the Iowa Agda Library (IAL), a basic library of Booleans, lists, etc., simply written for the beginner to understand. It has a lot of exercises and code snippets based on that library which I found useful and relatively easy to follow.

The book assumes no functional programming expertise, and since I’ve done a (very) little bit of functional programming in Haskell in the distant past, this made the introductory material easy to follow and a useful revision aid.

Introductory Agda

The early parts of the book – Chapters 1 to 4 – are based on various data structures: Booleans, natural numbers, lists. Here the functional programming adds little to what I’ve seen before. The neat thing is the ability to use Agda as a theorem prover. This is what is described in the book as “external verification” – you write code and then you prove – separately – theorems about the code.

Firstly, let’s take a look at some example Agda code, taken from Chapter 4:

take : ∀{ℓ}{A : Set ℓ} → (n : ℕ) → 𝕃 A → 𝕃 A
take 0       _         = []
take (suc n) []        = []
take (suc n) (x :: xs) = x :: take n xs

There’s a few interesting things here already. Firstly, unicode! It feels surprisingly liberating to write unicode characters in code. Secondly the type declaration declares (via ∀), the function to be polymorphic – it operates on lists (𝕃 from IAL) of any type A (of any level ℓ within a hierarchy of type levels).

The real excitement comes when we start proving theorems. For example, given the function nthTail from IAL which returns all elements after the first n elements in a list (and the empty list if the list has fewer than n elements), we can write

ex46 : ∀{ℓ}{A : Set ℓ} (n : ℕ)(l : 𝕃 A) → (take n l) ++ (nthTail n l) ≡ l
ex46 0        _                           = refl
ex46 (suc n) []                           = refl
ex46 (suc n)  (x :: xs) rewrite ex46 n xs = refl

Here ex46 is just the name of my proof (it was Exercise 4.6 in the book). The type declaration for the function ex46 can be read as “I’ll produce a proof that concatenating (take n l) with (nthTail n l) just produces l for all natural numbers n and for all lists of elements of any type A. Here ≡, taken from IAL, is propositional equality, and the only property of it we’re using is reflexivity; in fact the only inhabitant of this type is refl. The first two lines of the proof work because the definitions of take and nthTail are such that when the first argument is zero or the second argument is empty, the left and right hand side normalize to the same result, namely .l ≡ .l in the first case (.l being the name assigned to the second unnamed argument _) and [] ≡ [] in the second case. The third case explicitly uses induction: rewrite is a directive that applies the induction hypothesis ex46 n xs to the proof of ex46 (suc n) (x :: xs). Very pleasing!

Dependent Types Revealed

Chapter 5 is where we really start to see the power of dependent types. Up until this point, we’ve written functional programs and then proved properties about those programs. We have definitely used dependent types in the process, but they were somehow “invisible” to us as a user, and – at least for the exercises in the book – we could ignore the dependent-type based implementation without really affecting the usability of the approach. Chapter 5 shows how the proofs can be part of the programs themselves, using the type system to express the properties we wish to enforce. The simplest and clearest example given is a declaration of a vector datatype:

data 𝕍 {ℓ} (A : Set ℓ) : ℕ → Set ℓ where
[] : 𝕍 A 0
_::_ : {n : ℕ} (x : A) (xs : 𝕍 A n) → 𝕍 A (suc n)

Note here that a vector, unlike a list, has a specific length built into its type. As a result, you get various properties for free, for example Agda’s type system verifies that the length of the concatenation of two vectors is the sum of the individual lengths from a straight-forward definition of a concatenation operation; the code below type checks, and that’s all that necessary.

_++𝕍_ ∀{ℓ}{A : Set ℓ}{n m : ℕ} → 𝕍 A n → 𝕍 A m → 𝕍 A (n + m)
[] ++𝕍 ys = ys
(x :: xs) ++𝕍 ys = x :: (xs ++𝕍 ys)

A more complex example of Braun trees is described in detail in the book. These are binary trees where the data at a node has a value less than or equal to that of its children while the size of the node left and right subtrees are either equal or the left subtree is exactly one node larger than the right subtree. The author chooses to encode this latter property within the declaration of the Braun tree type, and then shows how to write code for tree insertion, deletion, etc.

I enjoyed this chapter, though it had me puzzling for quite some time over sigma types, a subtle and powerful idea that I think deserves a bit more discussion than the space given in the book; I ended up reading around this topic a bit before I felt comfortable. An example given considers a function that turns lists into vectors. Immediately we have a problem – what is the return type of this function? It should be (𝕍 A n) but n is not fixed! The solution presented is to return a type written in Agda as Σ ℕ (λ n → 𝕍 A n); an inhabitant of this type should be interpreted as “a pair consisting of a natural number and a function which, when applied to that natural number, returns the vector type we’re actually interested in.” This takes a little getting used to!

Type-Level Computation

Chapter 6, introduces the idea of proof by reflection, amongst other things. This looks super-powerful, and I’m motivated to dig further into this topic when I have the time. The author illustrates the concept by creating a list simplifier, which simplifies expressions on lists. By reflecting the operations on lists as corresponding constructors for list expressions, and then proving the soundness of the simplifier, he is able to use this soundness proof to, inter alia, prove properties about the operations operating on lists. The example is really interesting, though unlike in previous chapters of the book, it’s not really discussed in detail in Chapter 6, and you have to look carefully at the code accompanying the book to see how it all fits together.

The other primary example of Chapter 6 is a statically typed version of printf, the archetypal type-evasive function of my youth

int printf( const char *restrict format, ... );

Here, the author presents an example credited to Augustsson, showing that dependent types can come to the rescue essentially by providing a type for C’s “…” which depends on the format string.

The integer example from this chapter is the closest to my own interests, showing how integers can be defined using naturals in an interesting way: an integer is a natural together with a sign which is unit (trivial) if the natural is zero but has Boolean type otherwise, i.e. the type of the sign is dependent on the value of the natural, leading to the following type declaration and definition of ℤ [taken from here].

ℤ-pos-t : ℕ → Set
ℤ-pos-t 0 = ⊤
ℤ-pos-t (suc _) = 𝔹

data ℤ : Set where
mkℤ : (n : ℕ) → ℤ-pos-t n → ℤ

I had followed through the discussion in the book easily, but came totally unstuck when trying to implement a seemingly obvious exercise I set myself: prove that integer multiplication commutes using a pre-existing proof of the commutativity of multiplication over the naturals.

I had defined integer multiplication as:

_*ℤ_ : ℤ → ℤ → ℤ
_*ℤ_ (mkℤ 0 _)        _                = mkℤ 0 triv
_*ℤ_ (mkℤ (suc n) _)  (mkℤ 0 _)        = mkℤ 0 triv
_*ℤ_ (mkℤ (suc n) sn) (mkℤ (suc m) sm) = mkℤ ((suc n) * (suc m)) (sn xor sm)

where triv is the single inhabitant of the ⊤ type.  I had therefore naively assumed that one could simply write the proof as:

*ℤcommutes (mkℤ 0 _)        (mkℤ 0 _) = refl
*ℤcommutes (mkℤ 0 _) (mkℤ (suc bN) _) = refl
*ℤcommutes (mkℤ (suc aN) _) (mkℤ 0 _) = refl
*ℤcommutes (mkℤ (suc a) sa) (mkℤ (suc b) sb) rewrite xor-comm sa sb | (*comm (suc a) (suc b)) = refl

However, this fails – for the final pattern – for a very interesting reason that was, however, totally incomprehensible to me at first. Agda reports:

𝔹 !=< ℤ-pos-t w of type Set
when checking that the type
(b a w : ℕ) →
w ≡ suc (a + b * suc a) →
(sa sb : 𝔹) →
mkℤ w (sb xor sa) ≡ mkℤ (suc (a + b * suc a)) (sb xor sa)
of the generated with function is well-formed

“Huh? ‘Generated with function?'”

Thus began a small odyssey of Easter holiday evenings spent learning how rewrites are implemented as withs, and how withs in turn are implemented using generated auxiliary functions. I found Norrell and Chapman’s tutorial, together with the good quality documentation provided me with the necessary additional background required to teach myself what was going on here and to produce a final, working proof:

*ℤcommutes : ∀ (a b : ℤ) → a *ℤ b ≡ b *ℤ a
*ℤcommutes (mkℤ 0 _)        (mkℤ 0 _)        = refl
*ℤcommutes (mkℤ 0 _)        (mkℤ (suc m) sm) = refl
*ℤcommutes (mkℤ (suc n) _)  (mkℤ 0 _)        = refl
*ℤcommutes (mkℤ (suc n) sn) (mkℤ (suc m) sm)
with m + n * suc m | *comm (suc n) (suc m)
... | .(n + m * suc n) | refl rewrite xor-comm sn sm = refl

I have mixed feelings about this experience. On the one hand, I’ve learnt a lot about Agda specifically (and dependent types in general) by being forced to go through this process to understand what’s going on under the hood. On the other hand, this seems like a lot of hoops to jump through for this simple proof, and the book under review didn’t have all the answers I was looking for to solve the exercise. I don’t see the latter point as a big deal, but if you’re going to do your explorations on holiday, make sure you have a wifi connection available so you can look beyond the book for help!

Selected Topics

The remainder of the book is eclectic but interesting.

Chapters 7 and 8 combine to produce a larger example piece of code – a Huffman coder / decoder. It’s good to see the ideas put into practice in a larger case study, of course, though these chapters were less interesting to me personally.

Chapter 9 really recaptured my attention, though! The author uses Agda’s types to reason about termination. He explicitly sets up a general datatype representing what it means for a relation DAG to not have any infinite chain of successor nodes starting from a given named node, something he calls a terminating relation. He then proves in Agda that > over ℕ is terminating in this sense. The chapter then goes on to apply this to producing a termination proof for a recursively defined division function. I’m aware of this kind of reasoning, and have even played a bit with tools making use of these ideas like Byron Cook et al.‘s Terminator. So it’s interesting to see this in the context of the type system of Agda where in fact it becomes rather important since all functions must terminate in Agda – otherwise none of the proofs discussed above make sense!

The final chapter of the book, Chapter 10, formalises some ideas in a particular logic within Agda, using Agda to prove soundness and completeness of the logic.

Conclusion

The book ends rather abruptly with Chapter 10 on intuitionistic logic and Kripke semantics. There is no rounding off, summarising lessons learnt or directions for future research or indeed practical programming advice.

Nevertheless, I learnt a lot from reading this book – and a lot more from doing its exercises! It’s given me an initial understanding of one of the most recently talked-about developments in programming. I’m left keen to try to apply this to some real-world problems in my research! Well recommended holiday reading.

Over several holiday and train journeys, I’ve been slowly reading and digesting this book by Blum, Cucker, Shub, and Smale. It’s one of a number of books I’ve read that are definitively not in my research field – hence holiday reading – and yet touches it tangentially enough to get me excited. I’ve been interested in computation defined in terms of real numbers ever since my own PhD thesis back in 1998-2001, which looked at ways to take a specific class of computation defined on the reals and synthesise hardware circuits operating in very efficient fixed-point arithmetic. While my own work has often involved specifying computation on the reals, including recently exploiting the differences between real and finite precision computation for circuits, this book takes a fundamental look at computation over the reals themselves. In particular, it looks at what happens to notions of computability and complexity if you consider real addition, multiplication, division, and subtraction as basic operators in a computation model: what is computable, what resulting complexity bounds can be proved? Ever since my first exposure to algebraic geometry, especially real algebraic geometry, I see it everywhere – and have even made some small forays [1,2] into harnessing its power for hardware design. It’s a delight to see computability and algebraic geometry coming together so neatly in this text.

Part I: Basic Development

The authors define a computational model that is very natural for analysis: a computation consists of a control-flow graph consisting of input nodes, computation nodes (polynomial or rational maps), branch nodes (checking for equality or inequality, depending on whether the ring / field being computed over is ordered), and output nodes. For the remainder of this review, I will consider only computation over the reals, though some of the results are more general. Theorems naturally flow from this setting. My favourites: the halting set of a machine is a countable union of semialgebraic sets; there are “small” systems of polynomial inequalities, of low degree, describing behaviour of a machine up to time steps. As a by product, the first practical uses of this theory are illustrated, e.g. a proof that the Mandelbrot set is not decidable over . The interplay between the uncountable (program state) and the countable (program counter state) leads to some intricate and enjoyable analysis.

Chapter 3 generalises classical results for universal Turing machines, typically expressed in terms of unbounded tapes with binary storage at each location, to the case where an element of an arbitrary ring is stored at each location (imagine a real number stored at each location). Additional shift operations are introduced to deal with moving along the tape. It is shown that operation over unbounded sequences allows for uniformity of algorithm across dimensionality but does not add additional computational power for fixed dimensionality. In finite time we can only explore a finite portion of the tape, so we still retain the semi-algebraic (or countable union of semi-algebraic) sets for the halting sets derived in Chapter 2.

Chapter 4 extends the usual complexity-theoretic classes P and EXP to computation over a ring. Computation over corresponds to the classical case. There are no great surprises here for a reader who has read a basic text in computational complexity together with Chapters 1-3 of this book. The authors round off the chapter by using this new machinery to cast results from Goedel and Tarski from an interesting perspective. For example, Goedel becomes there exist definable undecidable sets over , while Tarski becomes every definable set over is decidable over . Questions of definability are then put off until the very end of this book – and this review.

Chapter 5 shows how classical NP, NP-complete and NP-hard definitions carry forward into computation over a general ring. Then, specialising the results to particular rings and particular costs of elementary operations (unit? dependent on size of numbers?), the NP-completeness of various key problems are shown. In particular, it is shown that the classical 3-SAT NP-completeness result can be obtained by working over the ring . The chapter ends with an interesting discussion of the P ?= NP question over various rings and with various costs. It’s interesting, for example, that the problem of determining whether there is a zero of a degree-4 polynomial is NP-complete over while that of a degree 3 is in P; analogous to the situation with 3-SAT versus 2-SAT in the classical setting.

Chapter 6 moves on to look specifically at machines over with bit cost, i.e. the bigger the number, the more it costs to operate on it. It is shown that these machines are polynomially equivalent to those operating over with unit cost, i.e. anything you can write in terms of algebraic operations over you can also write under the classical Turing model of computation, and vice versa, with only polynomial blow up in execution steps. This is not too surprising, and ultimately derives from the standard possibility of writing an integer as its binary expansion. The chapter then takes a detour via Farkas’s Lemma to show that linear programming feasibility (LPF) is in NP, a rather intricate result I first saw in Schrijver’s encyclopaedic book when working with my former PhD student Qiang Liu on discrete linear algebra for hardware memory optimization. It is noted that LPF’s status depends strongly on the choice of computation model and ring: in the (equivalent) classic setting of integers with bit cost it is NP-complete, over rationals with bit cost it is in P, while its status over is apparently open.

Part II: Some Geometry of Numerical Algorithms

This part of the book turns to look at specific algorithms such as Newton’s method and a homotopy method for nonlinear optimization. In each case, complexity results are given in terms of the number of basic real arithmetic operations required. Some fun analysis and quite a clear exposition of homotopy methods, which I’ve worked with before in the context of convex optimization, especially when using barrier methods for linear and convex quadratic programming, something I looked at quite carefully when trying to design FPGA-based computer architectures for this purpose.

The chapter on Bézout’s Theorem assumed a rather more thorough grounding in differential topology than I have, and I wasn’t entirely sure how it sat with the rest of the work, as the constructive / algorithmic content of the theorems was less apparent to me.

The final chapters of this part of the book took me back to more familiar territory – first introduced to me by the outstandingly clear encyclopaedic textbook by Nick Higham – the discussion of condition numbers for linear equations and the relationship to the loss of precision induced by solving such systems (roughly, the relative error in the right hand side of gets amplified by the condition number of the matrix ). What was interesting here is the authors’ probabilistic analysis – looking at the expected condition number if the matrix elements are iid Gaussian variables, for example. I have skimmed another book also co-authored by Cucker – on this very topic, and I’m waiting to have the time to read it. Condition for polynomial problems is covered, leading to complexity results for logarithmic barrier interior point methods for linear equations over (spoiler: it’s in ).

Part III: Complexity Classes over the Reals

After Part II, which was only interesting to me in parts, I started to get excited again by Part III. Lower bounds on the computational complexity of various problem are derived here based on some very interesting ideas. The basic scheme is to bound the number of different connected components in a (semi-)algebraic set in terms of the degree of the polynomials and the number of variables involved. The number of different connected components can then be used to bound the number of steps an (algebraic) machine takes to decide membership of that set.

In Chapter 17, the framework is extended to probabilistic machines, and the standard definition of BPP is extended to computation over an arbitrary ring, giving . The chapter then goes on to show that probabilistic machines over can be simulated by deterministic machines over without blowing up execution time, i.e. that , whereas this is unknown for the classical setting. The essence of the argument makes use of a special real number (shown, non constructively, to exist), encoding all the different “coin flips” that a probabilistic program makes during its execution, which is then encoded as a machine constant in the simulating machine.

Parallelism – close to my heart – is covered in Chapter 18, through the introduction of complexity classes , parallel polylogarithmic time, for sets that can be decided in time using a polynomial number of processors, and , parallel polynomial time, for sets that can be decided in polynomial time using an exponential number of processors (definitions following a SPMD computational model). Algorithms are derived for matrix inversion and product and a result is cited for parallel quantifier elimination over the reals.

Chapter 22 looks at the relative power of machines over , i.e. the classical model, compared to real machines which take inputs restricted to be drawn from . It’s fairly obvious that the latter setting can provide a lot of additional power, for example deciding membership of a set in can be done by encoding the characteristic function of the set as the digits of some real constant in the program. It is then shown that additive real machines (a restricted form of the machines discussed above, containing no multiplication or division) that additionally contain branching only on equality can solve exactly the same problems in polynomial time as in the classical model. This is unlike the case where branching can be over inequality, where some additional computational power is provided by this model.

Descriptive Complexity, Chapter 23 is interesting: the descriptive power of (a particular) first order logic extended with fixed point and maximisation operations and of existential second order logic are shown to correspond to a particular subclass of problems and , respectively. In the latter case, I think this essentially says that known results in the classical case carry forward to computation over the reals despite the move away from a finite ring. I am not familiar enough with computational complexity literature to comment on how the former result compares with the classical setting, and I didn’t feel that this point is was very well described in the book.

Conclusion

Overall, I found this book a little eclectic, especially Part II, reflective of the fact that it has clearly been put together drawing from a variety of different primary sources spanning several decades. This should not be seen as a criticism. The choice of material was wonderful for me – as holiday reading at least! – tangentially touching so many different topics I’ve seen during my career and drawing me in. In places, the development was over an arbitrary ring, in places over and in places over , and although for some sections it was absolutely clear why, for others it was less clear. Overall, though, I would very much recommend anyone who likes to keep a foot in both the continuous and discrete worlds to take a look at this book.

I read this book largely by accident, because I was attracted by the title. As an academic in (or rather, on the edge of) computer science, I come across logic regularly, both in teaching and research. Mathematics underpins almost everything I do, and I’m certainly interested in whether a mathematician’s view of logic differs significantly from that of a theoretical computer scientist (as a keen reader of mathematics, I’m well aware that standard mathematical practice of proof differs quite strongly from the formal approach studied in computer science, but this isn’t quite the same thing!) I once had a strong interest in philosophy, most significantly in epistemology, which is being rekindled by my involvement in education at the school level, and so combining all these factors, the title was very appealing. What I actually discovered when I started reading wasn’t exactly what I expected. But this book turns out to be an excellent, crystal clear, textbook suitable for undergraduates and those with just a limited level of mathematical maturity. The book is explicitly partitioned into three sections, but in practice I found that the first two sections, proof theory and computability theory (the “maths” and the “computer science”) were very familiar material for any computer scientist, and from my perspective there was no very clear difference in approach taken, just a difference in the range of topics covered.

Part 1, by Loveland, covers propositional and predicate logic, with a particular focus on automated proof by resolution. I found the description of resolution to be very clear, with a particular focus on the difference between resolution for propositional and predicate logic, and with one of the clearest descriptions of completeness results I’ve seen.

Part 2, by Hodel, covers computability theory. Again, the clarity is exemplary. The first chapter discusses concepts informally, the second precisely defines two machine models in a way very accessible to a computer engineer (effectively one supporting general recursion and one supporting only primitive recursion) and discusses their relative computational power. The insistence of an informal discussion first makes these distinctions come to life, and allows Hodel to frame the discussion around the Church-Turing thesis. The focus on compositionality when preserving partial recursiveness, and the emphasis on the ‘minimalisation’ operator (bounded and unbounded) was new to me, and again very clearly presented. Most introductory texts I’ve read only tend to hint at the link between Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Church’s Undecidability Theorem, whereas Hodel makes this link precise and explicit in Section 6.6, Computability and the Incompleteness Theorem.

Part 3, by Sterrett, covers philosophical logic. In particular, Sterrett considers the existence of alternatives to (rather than extensions of) classical logics. She focuses on the logic of entailment aka relevance logic introduced by Anderson and Belnap, into which she goes into depth. This logic comes from rethinking the meaning ascribed to the connective, , logical implication. In classical logic, this is a most confusing connective (or at least was to my students when I taught an introductory undergraduate course in the subject long ago). I would give my students examples of true statements such as “George is the Pope” implies “George is Hindu” to emphasise the difference between the material implication of classical logic and our everyday use of the word. It is exactly this discrepancy addressed by Anderson and Belnap’s logic. I was least familiar with the content of this part of the book, therefore the initial sections came as something of a surprise, as I found them rather drawn out and repetitive for my taste, certainly compared to the crisp presentation in Parts 1 and 2. However, things got exciting and much more fast moving by Chapter 8, Natural Deduction, where there are clear philosophical arguments to be had on both sides. In general, I found the discussion very interesting. Clearly a major issue with the line of reasoning given by my Pope/Hindu example above is that of relevance. Relevance might be a slippery notion to formalise, but it is done so here in a conceptually simple way: “in order to derive an implication, there must be a proof of the consequent in which the antecedent was actually used to prove the consequent.” Actually making this work in practice requires a significant amount of baggage, based on tagging wffs with relevance indices, which get propagated through the rules of deduction, recalling to my mind, my limited reading on the Curry-Howard correspondence. The book finishes with a semantics of Anderson and Belnap’s logic, based on four truth values rather than the two (true/false) of classical logic.

I can’t emphasise enough how easy this book is to read compared to most I’ve read on the subject. For example, I read all of Part 1 on a single plane journey.  I will be recommending this book to any of my research students who need a basic grounding in computability or logic.

A lot of my work revolves around various problems encountered when one tries to automate the production of hardware from a description of the behaviour the hardware is supposed to exhibit when in use. This problem has a long history, most recently going by the name “High Level Synthesis”. A natural question, but one that is oddly rarely asked in computer-aided design, is “what kind of description?”

Of course not only hardware designers need to specify behaviour. The most common kind of formal description is that of a programming language, so it seems natural to ask what the active community of programming language specialists have to say. I am  fortunate enough to be an investigator on a multidisciplinary EPSRC project with my friend and colleague Dan Ghica, specifically aimed at bringing together these two communities, and I thought it was time to undertake sufficient reading to help me bridge some gaps in terminology between our fields.

With this is mind, I recently read Bob Harper‘s Practical Foundations for Programming Languages. For an outsider to the field, this seems to be a fairly encyclopaedic book describing a broad range of theory in a fairly accessible way, although it did become less readily accessible to me as the book progressed. My colleague Andy Pitts is quoted on the back cover as saying that this book “reveals the theory of programming languages as a coherent scientific subject,” so with no further recommendation required, I jumped in!

I like the structure of this book because as a non-specialist I find this material heavy going: Harper has split a 500 page book into fully 50 chapters, which suits me very well. Each chapter has an introduction and a “notes” section and – for the parts in which I’m not very interested – I can read these bits to still get the gist of the material. Moreover, there is a common structure to these chapters, where each feature is typically first described in terms of its statics and then its dynamics. The 50 chapters are divided into 15 “parts”, to provide further structure to the material.

The early parts of the book are interesting, but not of immediate practical relevance to me as someone who wants to find a use for these ideas rather than study them in their own right. It is nice, however, to see many of the practical concepts I use in the rare occasions I get to write my own code, shown in their theoretical depth – function types, product types, sum types, polymorphism, classes and methods, etc. Part V, “Infinite Data Types” is of greater interest to me just because anything infinite seems to be of interest to me (and, more seriously, because one of the most significant issues I deal with in my work is mapping of algorithms conceptually defined over infinite structures into finite implementations).

Where things really get interesting for me is in Part XI, “Types as Propositions”. (I also love Harper’s distinction between constructive and classical logic as “logic as if people matter” versus “the logic of the mind of God”, and I wonder whether anyone has explored the connections between the constructive / classical logic dichotomy and the philosophical idealist / materialist one?) This left me wanting more, though, and in particular I am determined to get around to reading more about Martin-Löf type theory, which is not covered in this text.

Part XIV, Laziness, is also interesting for someone who has only played with laziness in the context of streams (in both Haskell and Scala, which take quite different philosophical approaches). Harper argues strongly in favour of allowing the programmer to make evaluation choices (lazy / strict, etc.).

Part XV, Parallelism, starts with the construction of a cost dynamics, which is fairly straight forward. The second chapter in this part looks at a concept called futures and their use in pipelining; while pipelining is my bread and butter in hardware design, the idea of a future was new to me. Part XVI, Concurrency, is also relevant to hardware design, of course. Chapter 43 makes an unexpected (for me!) link between the type system of a distributed concurrent language with modal logics, another area in which I am personally interested for epistemological reasons, but know little.

After discussing modularity, the book finishes off with a discussion of notions of equivalence.

I found this to be an enlightening read, and would recommend it to others with an interest in programming languages, an appetite for theoretical concerns, but a lack of exposure to the topics explored in programming language research.