haskell - How to compare two functions for equivalence, as in (λx.2*x) == (λx.x+x)?

Question

Is there a way to compare two functions for equality? For example, (λx.2*x) == (λx.x+x) should return true, because those are obviously equivalent.

Answer 1

It's pretty well-known that general function equality is undecidable in general, so you'll have to pick a subset of the problem that you're interested in. You might consider some of these partial solutions:

• Presburger arithmetic is a decidable fragment of first-order logic + arithmetic.
• The universe package offers function equality tests for total functions with finite domain.
• You can check that your functions are equal on a whole bunch of inputs and treat that as evidence for equality on the untested inputs; check out QuickCheck.
• SMT solvers make a best effort, sometimes responding "don't know" instead of "equal" or "not equal". There are several bindings to SMT solvers on Hackage; I don't have enough experience to suggest a best one, but Thomas M. DuBuisson suggests sbv.
• There's a fun line of research on deciding function equality and other things on compact functions; the basics of this research is described in the blog post Seemingly impossible functional programs. (Note that compactness is a very strong and very subtle condition! It's not one that most Haskell functions satisfy.)
• If you know your functions are linear, you can find a basis for the source space; then every function has a unique matrix representation.
• You could attempt to define your own expression language, prove that equivalence is decidable for this language, and then embed that language in Haskell. This is the most flexible but also the most difficult way to make progress.