Dependent Types at Work

Paper in proceeding, 2009

In these lecture notes we give an introduction to functional programming with dependent types. We use the dependently typed programming language Agda which is an extension of Martin-Löf type theory. First we show how to do simply typed functional programming in the style of Haskell and ML. Some differences between Agda's type system and the Hindley-Milner type system of Haskell and ML are also discussed. Then we show how to use dependent types for programming and we explain the basic ideas behind type-checking dependent types. We go on to explain the Curry-Howard identification of propositions and types. This is what makes Agda a programming logic and not only a programming language. According to Curry-Howard, we identify programs and proofs, something which is possible only by requiring that all program terminate. However, at the end of these notes we present a method for encoding partial and general recursive functions as total functions using dependent types.