Static Types As Search Heuristics

Static analysis techniques have been studied for many years in the functional programming community, most prominently the use of inferred types to eliminate run-time checks. In analogy, if we regard checking whether an instance is useful for a proof as run-time checks and we can find types that eliminate irrelevant instances, we may also be able to prevent proof searches from checking those irrelevant instances, thereby improving the performance. This paper introduces a method that employs types as heuristics in proof search.