Traced Types for Safe Strategic Rewriting

Abstract: Strategy languages enable programmers to compose rewrite rules into strategies and control their application. This is useful in programming languages, e.g., for describing program transformations compositionally, but also in automated theorem proving, where related ideas have been studies with tactics languages. Clearly, not all compositions of rewrites are correct, but how can we assist programmers in writing correct strategies? In this paper, we present a static type system for strategy languages. We combine a structural type system capturing how rewrite strategies transform the shape of the rewritten syntax with a novel tracing system that keeps track of all possible legal strategy execution paths. Our type system raises warnings when parts of a composition are guaranteed to fail at runtime, and errors when no legal execution for a strategy is possible. We present a formalization of our strategy language and novel tracing type system, and formally prove its type soundness. We present formal results, showing that ill-traced strategies are guaranteed to fail at runtime and that well-traced strategy executions "can't go wrong", meaning that they are guaranteed to have a possible successful execution path.