Type inhabitation
In type theory, a branch of mathematical logic, in a given typed calculus, the type inhabitation problem for this calculus is the following problem: given a type and a typing environment, does there exist a -term M such that ? With an empty type environment, such an M is said to be an inhabitant of.Relationship to logic
In the case of simply typed lambda calculus, a type has an inhabitant if and only if its corresponding proposition is a tautology of minimal implicative logic. Similarly, a System F type has an inhabitant if and only if its corresponding proposition is a tautology of second-order logic.For most typed calculi, the type inhabitation problem is very hard. Richard Statman proved that for simply typed lambda calculus the type inhabitation problem is PSPACE-complete. For other calculi, like System F, the problem is even undecidable.
