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Problem # 20 [SOLVED]

Submitted by Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini
Date: 2006
Statement. Type theoretic characterisation of hereditary permutations


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According to [Bergstra and Klop, 1980, Barendregt, 1984] (Definition 21.2.9) a closed lambda-term M  is a hereditary permutation if the Böhm tree BT  (M )  has the following properties:

The problem is to find a type assignment system in which all and only the hereditary permutations get types of a fixed shape.
Many other sets of λ  -terms have been characterised in this way, see for example [Kurata, 2002, Dezani-Ciancaglini et al., 2005] and the references there.

Solution: Makoto Tatsuta proved [Tatsuta, 2008] that the set of all hereditary permutations is not recursively enumerable, and therefore cannot be characterized by typability in a finitary type-assignment system. On the other hand, there is a system such that a term can be assigned a certain countably infinite family of types in that system if and only if it is a hereditary permutation.

References for # 20

[Barendregt, 1984]    Barendregt, H. (1984). The Lambda Calculus. Its Syntax and Semantics. North-Holland, second edition.

[Bergstra and Klop, 1980]    Bergstra, J. A. and Klop, J. W. (1980). Invertible terms in the lambda calculus. Theoretical Computer Science, 11:19–37.

[Dezani-Ciancaglini et al., 2005]    Dezani-Ciancaglini, M., Honsell, F., and Motohama, Y. (2005). Compositional characterization of λ  -terms using intersection types. Theoretical Computer Science, 340(3):459–495.

[Kurata, 2002]    Kurata, T. (2002). Intersection and singleton type assignment characterizing finite Böhm-trees. Information and Computation, 178(1):1–11.

[Tatsuta, 2008]    Tatsuta, M. (2008). Types for hereditary permutators. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, LICS 2008, 24-27 June 2008, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. http://nii.ac.jp/TechReports/07-010E.html .


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