A type theory for productive coprogramming via guarded recursion

Abstract

To ensure consistency and decidability of type checking, proof assistants impose a requirement of productivity on corecursive definitions. In this paper we investigate a type-based alternative to the existing syntactic productivity checks of Coq and Agda, using a combination of guarded recursion and quantification over clocks. This approach was developed by Atkey and McBride in the simply typed setting, here we extend it to a calculus with dependent types. Building on previous work on the topos-of-trees model we construct a model of the calculus using a family of presheaf toposes, each of which can be seen as a multi-dimensional version of the topos-of-trees. As part of the model construction we must solve the coherence problem for modelling dependent types in locally cartesian closed categories simulatiously in a whole family of locally cartesian closed categories. We do this by embedding all the categories in a large one and applying a recent approach to the coherence problem due to Streicher and Voevodsky.