Deep Induction: Induction Rules for (Truly) Nested Types

This paper introduces deep induction, and shows that it is the notion of induction most appropriate to nested types and other data types defined over, or mutually recursively with, (other) such types. Standard induction rules induct over only the top-level structure of data, leaving any data internal to the top-level structure untouched. By contrast, deep induction rules induct over all of the structured data present. We give a grammar generating a robust class of nested types (and thus ADTs), and develop a fundamental theory of deep induction for them using their recently defined semantics as fixed points of accessible functors on locally presentable categories. We then use our theory to derive deep induction rules for some common ADTs and nested types, and show how these rules specialize to give the standard structural induction rules for these types. We also show how deep induction specializes to solve the long-standing problem of deriving principled and practically useful structural induction rules for bushes and other truly nested types. Overall, deep induction opens the way to making induction principles appropriate to richly structured data types available in programming languages and proof assistants. Agda implementations of our development and examples, including two extended case studies, are available.

Coinductive predicates and final sequences in a fibration

Coinductive predicates express persisting ‘safety’ specifications of transition systems. Previous observations by Hermida and Jacobs identify coinductive predicates as suitable final coalgebras in a fibration – a categorical abstraction of predicate logic. In this paper, we follow the spirit of a seminal work by Worrell and study final sequences in a fibration. Our main contribution is to identify some categorical ‘size restriction’ axioms that guarantee stabilization of final sequences after ω steps. In its course, we develop a relevant categorical infrastructure that relates fibrations and locally presentable categories, a combination that does not seem to be studied a lot. The genericity of our fibrational framework can be exploited for binary relations (i.e. the logic of ‘binary predicates’) for which a coinductive predicate is bisimilarity, constructive logics (where interests are growing in coinductive predicates) and logics for name-passing processes.