I respect all directions of research in type theory. That being said, #AntiWTypeCrew, and I look forward to finally defeating it tomorrow

I regret to announce that I will not be defeating W types today, because from my experiments (and an old paper) I found that all you need for W types to behave nicely in ITT are eta rules and an explicit base case for W

I've discovered that the eta rules for sums (and by extension, case expressions) are in fact not merely some filling-up rules, but also cover a lot more pieces

Uh oh I'm going down a rabbit hole of eta equivalences

There is so much literature on what I thought would be a simple case of "I just need to look it up and I'll be done"

I've decided to pick four eta reductions as my hallowed laws and discarded the rest
I have not and will not prove that terms will normalize, but I think they do, since they're reduction rules and they go from bigger terms to smaller terms (no substitution required)
I'm not too sure about confluence since I did discard one big giant rule that's supposed to help the set be equivalent in some sense to the proper (but undecidable?) eta equivalence rule, but I've decided to solve that problem by not caring

Now I can get back to defeating the W types

Are you KIDDING me. One of these eta rules broke subject reduction

[SCENE: Γ = (P: Unit -> Type), (x: Unit), (f: (x: Unit) -> P x)]

Jesus: One of you will betray me tonight.

Γ ⊢ case_P x of [() ⇒ f ()] ⇝ f x: Is it me, Jesus?

Jesus: No.

Γ ⊢ case_(λx. Unit) x of [() ⇒ ()] ⇝ x: Is it me, Jesus?

Jesus: It's not you either.

Γ ⊢ case_P x of [() ⇒ f ()] ⇝ f (): Is it me, Jesus?

Jesus: *mockingly* Is it meee, Jesuuus??

This could never happen with inductive types with more than one branch since the expected types of the branches are different
This could never happen with constructors that take any arguments since the eta contraction only occurs on constant branches
Which means anything shaped like the unit type is literally the only time subject reduction could break

I could add a reduction rule that reduces anything of type Unit to ()... This would be for literally any inductive type shaped like a unit...... That feels cursed