Iowa Type Theory Commute
Aaron Stump talks about type theory, computational logic, and related topics in Computer Science on his short commute.
Iowa Type Theory Commute
Arithmetic operations in simply typed lambda calculus
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Aaron Stump
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Season 5
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Episode 3
It is maybe not so well known that arithmetic operations -- at least some of them -- can be implemented in simply typed lambda calculus (STLC). Church-encoded numbers can be given the simple type (A -> A) -> A -> A, for any simple type A. If we abbreviate that type as Nat_A, then addition and multiplication can both be typed in STLC, at type Nat_A -> Nat_A -> Nat_A. Interestingly, things change with exponentiation, which we will consider in the next episode.