Should weak forms of the axiom of choice really be accepted within constructive mathematics? A critical view of the Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov interpretation, accompanied by the intention to include nondeterministic algorithms, leads us to subscribe to Richman's appeal for dropping countable choice. As an alternative interpretation of intuitionistic logic, we propose to renew dialogue semantics.

Several extensions of Gödel's system TT with new forms of recursion have been designed for the purpose of giving a computational interpretation to classical analysis. One can organise many of these extensions into two groups: those based on bar recursion , which include Spector's original bar recursion, modified bar recursion and the more recent products of selections functions, or those based on open recursion which in particular include the symmetric Berardi–Bezem–Coquand functional. We relate these two groups by showing that both (...) open recursion and the BBC functional are primitive recursively equivalent to a variant of modified bar recursion. Our results, in combination with existing research, essentially complete the classification up to primitive recursive equivalence of those extensions of system TT used to give a direct computational interpretation to choice principles. (shrink)

We present an extension of Heyting arithmetic in finite types called Uniform Heyting Arithmetic that allows for the extraction of optimized programs from constructive and classical proofs. The system has two sorts of first-order quantifiers: ordinary quantifiers governed by the usual rules, and uniform quantifiers subject to stronger variable conditions expressing roughly that the quantified object is not computationally used in the proof. We combine a Kripke-style Friedman/Dragalin translation which is inspired by work of Coquand and Hofmann and a variant (...) of the refined A-translation due to Buchholz, Schwichtenberg and the author to extract programs from a rather large class of classical first-order proofs while keeping explicit control over the levels of recursion and the decision procedures for predicates used in the extracted program. (shrink)

Consider the following restriction of the polymorphically typed lambda calculus . All quantifications are parameter free. In other words, in every universal type α.τ, the quantified variable α is the only free variable in the scope τ of the quantification. This fragment can be locally proven terminating in a system of intuitionistic second-order arithmetic known to have strength of finitely iterated inductive definitions.