Semantics of Intensional Type Theory extended with Decidable Equational Theories

Abstract

Incorporating extensional equality into a dependent intensional type system such as the Calculus of Constructions (CC) provides with stronger type-checking capabilities and makes the proof development closer to intuition. Since strong forms of extensionality generally leads to undecidable type-checking, it seems a reasonable trade-off to extend intensional equality with a decidable first-order theory, as experimented in earlier work on CoqMTU and its implementation CoqMT.
In this work, CoqMTU is extended with strong eliminations. The meta-theoretical study, particularly the part relying on semantic arguments, is more complex. A set-theoretical model of the equational theory is the key ingredient to derive the logical consistency of the formalism. Strong normalization, the main lemma from which type-decidability follows, is proved by attaching realizability information to the values of the model.
The approach we have followed is to first consider an abstract notion of first-order equational theory, and then instantiate it with a particular instance, Presburger Arithmetic. These results have been formalized using Coq.