Conversation

I think I might be using "irrelevance" where I mean "erasure"/"erasibility", or vice versa. Do those mean the same thing or is there a fine distinction? What does "allowed to treat them as multiplicity 0" mean in practice? I thought lower mult.s give you strictly fewer options?
1
I'm not an expert on either of these topics, but irrelevance as in "computational irrelevance" seems to be equivalent to "erasibility" to me. And I'm not aware of any kind of irrelevance that does not imply computational irrelevance.
1
2
Regarding multiplicity, yes, 0 gives you fewer options, OTOH lower multiplicity is of course desirable for better performance. We statically know that we do not need the "more options" for any proof value because of computational irrelevance, so we know they will always be erased
1
1
Hmm is it? I see two possibilities (which I think are different): no more than 1 copy/alias of this exists (uniqueness typing), vs. the caller only gets 1 copy of it. And the latter seems more likely...
1
Well, that's just what it means elsewhere -- how many copies you get to use, not how many exist. (There was something in the linear haskell paper wrt `forall a. (Foo -o a) -o a)` being an encoding of a linear value; maybe that gets you closer?)
1
Also IIUC, "linearity" of an arg means "callee may only use it once, caller any number of times", and "uniqueness" is the reverse, "caller may only use it once, callee any number of times", but I think you'd want to restrict both sides? At least Rust works that way...
1
1
Show replies