Curry's paradox (named after the same person as the present programming language) is a construction possible in a faulty logic that allows one to prove anything.
I know nothing about logic, but how hard can it be?
module Main where
import Data.Void
import Data.Function
data X = X (X -> Void)
x :: X
x = fix \(X f) -> X f
u :: Void
u = let (X f) = x in f x
main :: IO ()
main = u `seq` print "Done!"
It certainly does loop. (How does GHC know?!)
% ghc -XBlockArguments Z.hs && ./Z
[1 of 1] Compiling Main ( Z.hs, Z.o )
Linking Z ...
Z: <<loop>>
fix
or recursion? Why?The encoding of Curry's paradox looks more like this:
x :: X
x = X (\x'@(X f) -> f x')
X
can indeed be read as the sentence "if X
is true, then there is a contradiction", or equivalently, "X
is false".
But using fix
to prove X
is not really meaningful, because fix
is blatantly incorrect as a reasoning principle. Curry's paradox is more subtle.
How do you actually prove X
?
x :: X
x = _
X
is a conditional proposition, so you can start by assuming its premise to show its conclusion. This logical step corresponds to inserting a lambda. (Constructively, a proof of an implication is a mapping from proofs of the premise to proofs of the conclusion.)
x :: X
x = X (\x' -> _)
But now we have an assumption x' :: X
, we can unfold the definition of X
again to get f :: X -> Void
. In informal descriptions of Curry's paradox, there is no explicit "unfolding step", but in Haskell it corresponds to pattern-matching on the newtype constructor when X
is an assumption, or applying the constructor when X
is the goal (in fact, as we did above):
x :: X
x = X (\x'@(X f) -> _)
Finally, we now have f :: X -> Void
and x' :: X
, so we can deduce Void
by function application:
x :: X
x = X (\x'@(X f) -> f x')