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>
It was not a good idea to use heterogeneous equality as the default equality in Lean.
It creates the following problems.
- Heterogeneous equality does not propagate constraints in the elaborator.
For example, suppose that l has type (List Int), then the expression
l = nil
will not propagate the type (List Int) to nil.
- It is easy to write false. For example, suppose x has type Real, and the user
writes x = 0. This is equivalent to false, since 0 has type Nat. The elaborator cannot introduce
the coercion since x = 0 is a type correct expression.
Homogeneous equality does not suffer from the problems above.
We keep heterogeneous equality because it is useful for generating proof terms.
Signed-off-by: Leonardo de Moura <leonardo@microsoft.com>
