A new draft paper, State Machines All The Way Down, which describes an architecture for dependently typed functional programs. Abstract:

A useful pattern in dependently typed programming is to define a state transition system, for example the states and operations in a network protocol, as a parameterised monad. We index each operation by its input and output states, thus guaranteeing that operations satisfy pre- and post-conditions, by typechecking. However, what if we want to write a program using several systems at once? What if we want to define a high level state transition system, such as a network application protocol, in terms of lower level states, such as network sockets and mutable variables? In this paper, I present an architecture for dependently typed applications based on a hierarchy of state transition systems, implemented as a library called states . Using states , I show: how to implement a state transition system as a dependent type, with type level guarantees on its operations; how to account for operations which could fail; how to combine state transition systems into a larger system; and, how to implement larger systems as a hierarchy of state transition systems. As an example, I implement a simple high level network application protocol.

Comments welcome! You can get the draft here.