Relating Church-Style and Curry-Style Subtyping

Type theories with higher-order subtyping or singleton types are examples of systems where computation rules for variables are affected by type information in the context. A complication for these systems is that bounds declared in the context do not interact well with the logical relation proof of completeness or termination. This paper proposes a natural modification to the type syntax for Fω ≤ , adding a variable’s bound to the variable type constructor, thereby separating the computational behavior of the variable from the context. The algorithm for subtyping in Fω ≤ can then be given on types without context or kind information. As a consequence, the metatheory follows the general approach for type systems without computational information in the context, including a simple logical relation definition without Kripke-style indexing by context. This new presentation of the system is shown to be equivalent to the traditional presentation without bounds on the variable type constructor.