A Sound and Complete Substitution Algorithm for Multimode Type Theory

Abstract

Multimode Type Theory (MTT) is a generic type theory that can be instantiated with an arbitrary mode theory to model features like parametricity, cohesion and guarded recursion. However, the presence of modalities in MTT significantly complicates the substitution calculus of this system. Moreover, MTT’s syntax has explicit substitutions with an axiomatic system - not an algorithm - governing the connection between an explicitly substituted term and the resulting term in which variables have actually been replaced. So far, the only results on eliminating explicit substitutions in MTT rely on normalisation by evaluation and hence also immediately normalise a term. In this paper, we present a substitution algorithm for MTT that is completely separated from normalisation. To this end, we introduce Substitution-Free Multimode Type Theory (SFMTT): a formulation of MTT without explicit substitutions, but for which we are able to give a structurally recursive substitution algorithm, suitable for implementation in a total programming language or proof assistant. On the usual formulation of MTT, we consider σ-equality, the congruence generated solely by equality rules for explicit substitutions. There is a trivial embedding from SFMTT to MTT, and a converse translation that eliminates the explicit substitutions. We prove soundness and completeness of our algorithm with respect to σ-equivalence and thus establish that MTT with σ-equality has computable σ-normal forms, given by the terms of SFMTT.