See Section "Other goodies" at
https://github.com/leanprover/lean/wiki/Refactoring-structures
This commit also improves the support for projections in the
unifier/matcher.
Now, we consider the extra case-split for projections.
Given a projection `proj`, and the constraint `proj s =?= proj t`, we need to try first `s =?= t` and if it fails, then try to reduce.
This is needed in the standard library because we now have constraints such as:
```
@has_le.le ?A ?s ?a ?b =?= @has_le.le nat nat.has_add x y
```
If we reduce the right hand side, we get the unsolvable constraint
```
@has_le.le ?A ?s ?a ?b =?= nat.le x y
```
Before this change, the constraint was `@le ?A ?s ?a ?b =?= @le nat nat.has_add x y`, and we already perform a case-split in this case.
Moreover, projections were eagerly reduced whenever possible.
The extra case-split generates a performance problem in several tests. For example `fib 8 = 34` was timing out.
I worked around this issue by performing the case-split only when the constraint contains meta-variables.
There are also minor issues. Example. `<` is notation for `has_lt.lt`, but `>` is for `gt`.
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>
