A Functional Hitchhiker's Guide to Hereditarily Finite Sets, Ackermann Encodings and Pairing Functions

Abstract: The paper is organized as a self-contained literate Haskell program that implements elements of an executable finite set theory with focus on combinatorial generation and arithmetic encodings. The code, tested under GHC 6.6.1, is available at http://logic.csci.unt.edu/tarau/research/2008/fSET.zip . We introduce ranking and unranking functions generalizing Ackermann's encoding to the universe of Hereditarily Finite Sets with Urelements. Then we build a lazy enumerator for Hereditarily Finite Sets with Urelements that matches the unranking function provided by the inverse of Ackermann's encoding and we describe functors between them resulting in arithmetic encodings for powersets, hypergraphs, ordinals and choice functions. After implementing a digraph representation of Hereditarily Finite Sets we define {\em decoration functions} that can recover well-founded sets from encodings of their associated acyclic digraphs. We conclude with an encoding of arbitrary digraphs and discuss a concept of duality induced by the set membership relation. Keywords: hereditarily finite sets, ranking and unranking functions, executable set theory, arithmetic encodings, Haskell data representations, functional programming and computational mathematics