Development of the Productive Forces (meta 2012)

Proofs involving infinite structures can use corecursive functions as inhabitants of a corecursive type. Admissibility of such functions in theorem provers such as Coq or Agda, requires that these functions are productive. Typically this is proved by showing satisfaction of a guardedness condition. The guardedness condition however is extremely restrictive and many programs which are in fact productive and therefore will not compromise soundness are nonetheless rejected. Supercompilation is a family of program transformations which retain program equivalence. Using supercompilation we can take programs whose productivity is suspected and transform them into programs for which guardedness is syntactically apparent.