The environment object is a "smart-pointer".
Before this commit, the use of "const &" for environment objects was broken.
For example, suppose we have a function f that should not modify the input environment.
Before this commit, its signature would be
void f(environment const & env)
This is broken, f's implementation can easilty convert it to a read-write pointer by using
the copy constructor.
environment rw_env(env);
Now, f can use rw_env to update env.
To fix this issue, we now have ro_environment. It is a shared *const* pointer.
We can convert an environment into a ro_environment, but not the other way around.
ro_environment can also be seen as a form of documentation.
For example, now it is clear that type_inferer is not updating the environment, since its constructor takes a ro_environment.
Signed-off-by: Leonardo de Moura <leonardo@microsoft.com>
This normalization rule is not really a computational rule.
It is essentially encoding the reflexivity axiom as computation.
It can also be abaused. For example, with this rule,
the following definition is valid:
Theorem Th : a = a := Refl b
Signed-off-by: Leonardo de Moura <leonardo@microsoft.com>
