PARAMETRIC AND TYPE-DEPENDENT POLYMORPHISM
Giuseppe Longo · Fundamenta Informaticae · 1995
Data Types, though, as Reynolds stresses, is not perfectly suited for higher type or higher order systems and, thus, he proposes a "relational" treatment of invariance: computations do not depend on types in the sense that they are "invariant" w.r.t. arbitrary relations on types and between types. Reynolds's approach set the basis for most of the current work on parametricity, as we will review below (.3). Some twelve years earlier, Girard had given just a simple hint towards another understanding of the properties of "computing with types". In [Gir71], it is shown, as a side remark, that, given a type A, if one defines a term J A such that, for any type B, J A B reduces to 1, if A = B, and reduces to 0, if A ¹ B, then F + J A does not normalize. In particular, then, J A is not definable in F. This remark on how terms may depend on types is inspired by a view of types which is quite different from Reynolds's. System F was born as the theory of proofs of second order intuitionis...