Bag Equivalence via a Proof-Relevant Membership Relation

Bag Equivalence via a Proof-Relevant Membership Relation
Nils Anders Danielsson
Interactive Theorem Proving, Third International Conference, ITP 2012. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com. [pdf, highlighted code, tarball with code, Git repository (may include more recent developments)]

Abstract

Two lists are bag equivalent if they are permutations of each other, i.e. if they contain the same elements, with the same multiplicity, but perhaps not in the same order. This paper describes how one can define bag equivalence as the presence of bijections between sets of membership proofs. This definition has some desirable properties:

• Many bag equivalences can be proved using a flexible form of equational reasoning.
• The definition generalises easily to arbitrary unary containers, including types with infinite values, such as streams.
• By using a slight variation of the definition one gets set equivalence instead, i.e. equality up to order and multiplicity. Other variations give the subset and subbag preorders.
• The definition works well in mechanised proofs.

Updates

The paper states that the new definition of bag equivalence is equivalent to a more standard one. In the accompanying code it is proved that, if "bijection" is replaced by the equivalent concept of "weak equivalence" in the general versions of these definitions (those that work for all unary containers), then they are isomorphic (assuming extensionality).

If the membership relation is not "set-valued" it is perhaps more appropriate to define the subbag relation in terms of what the Homotopy Type Theory book calls "embeddings" rather than injections.