Foundational extensible corecursion: a proof assistant perspective

This paper presents a formalized framework for defining corecursive functions safely in a total setting, based on corecursion up-to and relational parametricity. The end product is a general corecursor that allows corecursive (and even recursive) calls under “friendly” operations, including constructors. Friendly corecursive functions can be registered as such, thereby increasing the corecursor’s expressiveness. The metatheory is formalized in the Isabelle proof assistant and forms the core of a prototype tool. The corecursor is derived from first principles, without requiring new axioms or extensions of the logic.

© Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming - ICFP 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/10.1145/2784731.2784732