Consistency of a Dependent Calculus of Indistinguishability
The Dependent Calculus of Indistinguishability (DCOI) uses dependency tracking to identify irrelevant arguments and uses indistinguishability during type conversion to enable proof irrelevance, supporting run-time and compile-time irrelevance with the same uniform mechanism. DCOI also internalizes reasoning about indistinguishability through the use of a propositional equality type indexed by an observer level.
As DCOI is a pure type system, prior work establishes only its syntactic type safety, justifying its use as the basis for a programming language with dependent types. However, it was not clear whether any instance of this system would be suitable for use as a type theory for theorem proving. Here, we identify a suitable instance DCOIω, which has an infinite predicative universe hierarchy. We show that DCOIω is logically consistent, normalizing, and that type conversion is decidable. We have mechanized all results using the Coq proof assistant.