Path dependent types

Modeling algebraic structures has never been easier

Let’s start with small refreshment of what actually the dependent typing is. Using Wikipedia as a source:

In computer science and logic, a dependent type is a type that depends on a value.

Neat, huh? But what does it mean in practice? If you take a look at the Wikipedia’s list of languages that implement dependent typing you might get strange sensation that it is something really obscure and esoteric. Languages mentioned there range from “never heard of” (Guru/Matita anyone?) to “yeah, I recall reading about it on Reddit once or twice” (Coq/Idris). Oh wait, there is F# . Ooops, sorry, it is not F# but F* . Thanks goodness it is something from Microsoft at least. And look ma’, no Haskell. If it is not implemented in Haskell then truly, what problems can it solve?

Well, actually dependent typing is helpful in solving very down-to-earth problems. I bet that everyone programming in a language with sufficiently expressive type system has wondered at least once — why my type system does not prevent me from, say, accessing head of empty list? This question is in fact the canonical showcase for dependent typing. Just imagine — if you could somehow encode the length of a list (a value) into its type then it’d be trivial to state that list of length 0 (type that depends on a value, mind you) has no head to be accessed. Standard library would have just been changed to (please bear with my completely made up syntax):

Oh, by the way, just observe what you could have achieved when it comes to concatenation:

See how you would have been able to track the actual length of the list throughout the program by saying that e.g. appending an element to a list of length n produces list with length n + 1 .

Curious reader will notice that a concept of separation empty and non-empty lists is already present in Scalaz NonEmptyList . That’s true, but observe how calling tail of NonEmptyList produces an ordinary List with no extra guarantees. That’s because at this point the type system cannot tell apart lists of length 1 (which tails are obviously empty) and longer lists. Of course you could try to remedy this problem by introducing OneElementList type with appropriate tail/head signatures but this remedy quickly falls short when you discover that you really want List to have drop(n: Int) method and you just can’t express that, because there is no way to tell what is the type of the result when there is no “link” between values’ world and types’ world.

Of course there have been attempts to have this neat “link” in Scala. Make sure you are familiar with ideas behind Church encoding and then (and only then) take a deep dive into renowned Shapeless lib, and its implementation of type-level naturals. It looks like this is what we are looking for until you realize that out-of-the-box representation takes you only up to 1.000 or so before compiler gives up (1.000 encoded as a type is represented as Succ[Succ[Succ[... _0]]]] ) and there is no way to encode a number that is not compile-time constant. But, all in all you are able to do type-level computations and all this is pretty close to the real thing.

Would it be possible to overcome these limitations and have a simple value <-> type reasoning in Scala without making your compiler burn tires? Sure there is …

Path dependent types

You need to know that Scala has a notion of a type dependent on a value. Only that the notion of dependency is not expressed in type signature but rather in type placement. Martin Odersky outlined this idea in a co-authored paper Foundations of Path-Dependent Types where we read:

(…) types must be able to refer to objects, i.e. contain terms that serve as static approximation of a set of dynamic objects. In other words, some level of dependent types is required; the usual notion is that ofpath-dependent types.

I found pretty nice and suggestive introduction to path dependent types here. You can find a good read on this topic in ktoso’s vademecum of types as well. To recap, let’s contemplate for a minute the following snippet:

When you have become enlightened we will be proceeding to the main part of this post. That is, how on earth I used that when solving one of the Codility challenges?

Problem to solve

When I feel my algorithmic skills are getting rusty, I usually end up checking Codility’s web page and finding myself a challenging problem to work on (BTW, I recommend it to everyone — it simply makes you a better programmer). I always try not only to solve a problem, but also to write the most idiomatic code in a language I am using. This way you can enjoy two benefits simultaneously: your problem solving fu is going up and the mastery of your language of choice is skyrocketing.

The particular problem that pushed me toward path dependent types is called Omicron. It has already been “officially” solved so you can spare yourself some heavy thinking. The problem is about efficiently computing Fib(A ** B) % 10000103 . It’s too slow to use BigInteger arithmetic, so you need to employ modular arithmetic. The official solution does that, but, alas, the code is littered with modulo operations

which is bad-looking and error prone. Nah, no self-respecting Scala programmer would do that to her code. In fact, we are easily able to do better in Scala, it just takes a second to notice that implicit conversions are in the language for a reason… But wait — convert to what exactly? How can you represent a type with semantics of an integer modulo N where N is inevitably a large prime number?

Obviously, you could just make N an implicit and put it in a scope of code doing the operation. But in the challenge you will actually need two moduli — one for the result, and the other that is period of Fibonacci sequence (I recommend to try solving it for yourself, I am not going to analyze the problem itself in this post). What’s more, we’d ideally want to have as much type-safety as possible. We want compiler to prevent us from accidentally operating on integers from one finite field (that is integers mod N) in a different field (integers mod M). You could try to encode modulus as Shapeless’ type-level natural, but numbers used in our solution are pretty large (10000103 and 20000208) so that would very probably blow up your compiler.

Path-dependent typing to the rescue!

Solution

To summarize, we need to devise a system that lets us:

perform modulo computations transparently, be sure that compiler won’t let us use int mod N as int mod M.

Let’s stick with the 2nd part for a while. This requirement seems to fit path-dependent typing nicely. We need to make sure that whenever we operate on a modulus it comes from an unique “path”, so the compiler can track it for us. This path’s got to be represented by some type. Let’s call this type Z to mimic mathematical notation (we can say that it represents a finite field for some N).

Let’s check if we can mix moduli from different fields:

Good, no way to do harm. Having done this, let’s try to define a type representing an integer mod some modulus.

In other words, our “integer mod N” is parametrized by the path-dependent Modulus type (notice Z# notation) and by virtue of this the IntMod[z1.Modulus] is an entirely different type from IntMod[z2.Modulus] . This is exactly what we wanted in order to achieve 2 from our little list. By the way, we have made IntMod ‘s constructor private to take a stab at the 1st point. We don’t wanna let anyone instantiate our integers because we want them to be indistinguishable from “real” numerics. We have also made it value type for a good measure, we’d certainly like to squeeze a little bit of performance where possible.

So how do we mix IntMods with Scala native types? We need to be able to lift any numeric to our IntMod implicitly. Let’s make a companion object to help with this.

So far so good, but how do we implement the longAsIntModN method? We’ll need a value of (correctly-typed) modulus for this. Where can we get one from? Well, let’s make it an implicit parameter and take advantage of the fact that type parameters are searched in the process of implicit resolution. In other words, if we introduced a Modulus companion object producing the implicit, it’d be resolved from there. After these changes our code looks like this:

Let’s check how we are doing:

Lookin’ good, huh? Actually, we have almost completed our task. What remains is just to implement missing algebraic operations. And our implicit conversions render it a trivial task (mostly, division is tricky).

Epilogue

I hope I showed you how various flavors of dependent typing can be useful in everyday programming. While we can’t yet enjoy expressiveness of type systems with full dependent types, Scala has enough to control type dependencies in amazing ways you’d think are only possible at the run time. If you’re wondering what is the precise relation between path-dependent types and dependent types, let me point you to Miles Sabin’s thoughtful and detailed reply to similar question on Stack Overflow: