scholarly journals Bidirectional Typing

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Jana Dunfield ◽  
Neel Krishnaswami
Keyword(s):  
Type Systems ◽  
Design Principles ◽  
Type Inference ◽  
Type Synthesis ◽  
Type Checking ◽  
Local Type ◽  
Typed Languages

Bidirectional typing combines two modes of typing: type checking, which checks that a program satisfies a known type, and type synthesis, which determines a type from the program. Using checking enables bidirectional typing to support features for which inference is undecidable; using synthesis enables bidirectional typing to avoid the large annotation burden of explicitly typed languages. In addition, bidirectional typing improves error locality. We highlight the design principles that underlie bidirectional type systems, survey the development of bidirectional typing from the prehistoric period before Pierce and Turner’s local type inference to the present day, and provide guidance for future investigations.

scholarly journals Practical type inference for arbitrary-rank types

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON PEYTON JONES ◽  
DIMITRIOS VYTINIOTIS ◽  
STEPHANIE WEIRICH ◽  
MARK SHIELDS
Keyword(s):  
Type System ◽  
Type Systems ◽  
Inference Engine ◽  
Type Inference ◽  
Functional Language ◽  
Local Type ◽  
Arbitrary Rank ◽  
Complete Type ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Higher Rank

AbstractHaskell's popularity has driven the need for ever more expressive type system features, most of which threaten the decidability and practicality of Damas-Milner type inference. One such feature is the ability to write functions with higher-rank types – that is, functions that take polymorphic functions as their arguments. Complete type inference is known to be undecidable for higher-rank (impredicative) type systems, but in practice programmers are more than willing to add type annotations to guide the type inference engine, and to document their code. However, the choice of just what annotations are required, and what changes are required in the type system and its inference algorithm, has been an ongoing topic of research. We take as our starting point a λ-calculus proposed by Odersky and Läufer. Their system supports arbitrary-rank polymorphism through the exploitation of type annotations on λ-bound arguments and arbitrary sub-terms. Though elegant, and more convenient than some other proposals, Odersky and Läufer's system requires many annotations. We show how to use local type inference (invented by Pierce and Turner) to greatly reduce the annotation burden, to the point where higher-rank types become eminently usable. Higher-rank types have a very modest impact on type inference. We substantiate this claim in a very concrete way, by presenting a complete type-inference engine, written in Haskell, for a traditional Damas-Milner type system, and then showing how to extend it for higher-rank types. We write the type-inference engine using a monadic framework: it turns out to be a particularly compelling example of monads in action. The paper is long, but is strongly tutorial in style. Although we use Haskell as our example source language, and our implementation language, much of our work is directly applicable to any ML-like functional language.

Pure iso-type systems

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
YANPENG YANG ◽  
BRUNO C. D. S. OLIVEIRA
Keyword(s):  
Operational Semantics ◽  
Type System ◽  
Type Systems ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Functional Languages ◽  
Type Conversion ◽  
Type Checking ◽  
Parallel Reduction ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Typed Languages

Abstract Traditional designs for functional languages (such as Haskell or ML) have separate sorts of syntax for terms and types. In contrast, many dependently typed languages use a unified syntax that accounts for both terms and types. Unified syntax has some interesting advantages over separate syntax, including less duplication of concepts, and added expressiveness. However, integrating unrestricted general recursion in calculi with unified syntax is challenging when some level of type-level computation is present, since properties such as decidable type-checking are easily lost. This paper presents a family of calculi called pure iso-type systems (PITSs), which employs unified syntax, supports general recursion and preserves decidable type-checking. PITS is comparable in simplicity to pure type systems (PTSs), and is useful to serve as a foundation for functional languages that stand in-between traditional ML-like languages and fully blown dependently typed languages. In PITS, recursion and recursive types are completely unrestricted and type equality is simply based on alpha-equality, just like traditional ML-style languages. However, like most dependently typed languages, PITS uses unified syntax, naturally supporting many advanced type system features. Instead of implicit type conversion, PITS provides a generalization of iso-recursive types called iso-types. Iso-types replace the conversion rule typically used in dependently typed calculus and make every type-level computation explicit via cast operators. Iso-types avoid the complexity of explicit equality proofs employed in other approaches with casts. We study three variants of PITS that differ on the reduction strategy employed by the cast operators: call-by-name, call-by-value and parallel reduction. One key finding is that while using call-by-value or call-by-name reduction in casts loses some expressive power, it allows those variants of PITS to have simple and direct operational semantics and proofs. In contrast, the variant of PITS with parallel reduction retains the expressive power of PTS conversion, at the cost of a more complex metatheory.

scholarly journals Local Type Checking for Linked Data Consumers

2013 ◽  
Vol 123 ◽  
pp. 19-33
Author(s):  
Gabriel Ciobanu ◽  
Ross Horne ◽  
Vladimiro Sassone
Keyword(s):  
Linked Data ◽  
Type Checking ◽  
Local Type

scholarly journals Implicit self-adjusting computation for purely functional programs

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
YAN CHEN ◽  
JOSHUA DUNFIELD ◽  
MATTHEW A. HAMMER ◽  
UMUT A. ACAR
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
Type System ◽  
Type Systems ◽  
Type Inference ◽  
Source Program ◽  
Target Program ◽  
Implicit Approach ◽  
Asymptotic Complexity ◽  
Cost Semantics ◽  
Output Behavior

AbstractComputational problems that involve dynamic data, such as physics simulations and program development environments, have been an important subject of study in programming languages. Building on this work, recent advances in self-adjusting computation have developed techniques that enable programs to respond automatically and efficiently to dynamic changes in their inputs. Self-adjusting programs have been shown to be efficient for a reasonably broad range of problems, but the approach still requires an explicit programming style, where the programmer must use specific monadic types and primitives to identify, create, and operate on data that can change over time. We describe techniques for automatically translating purely functional programs into self-adjusting programs. In this implicit approach, the programmer need only annotate the (top-level) input types of the programs to be translated. Type inference finds all other types, and a type-directed translation rewrites the source program into an explicitly self-adjusting target program. The type system is related to information-flow type systems and enjoys decidable type inference via constraint solving. We prove that the translation outputs well- typed self-adjusting programs and preserves the source program's input–output behavior, guaranteeing that translated programs respond correctly to all changes to their data. Using a cost semantics, we also prove that the translation preserves the asymptotic complexity of the source program.

Weak polymorphism can be sound

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Greiner
Keyword(s):  
New Jersey ◽  
Type System ◽  
Type Systems ◽  
Type Inference ◽  
Inference Algorithm ◽  
Standard Ml ◽  
Polymorphic Type

AbstractThe weak polymorphic type system of Standard ML of New Jersey (SML/NJ) (MacQueen, 1992) has only been presented as part of the implementation of the SML/NJ compiler, not as a formal type system. As a result, it is not well understood. And while numerous versions of the implementation have been shown unsound, the concept has not been proved sound or unsound. We present an explanation of weak polymorphism and show that a formalization of this is sound. We also relate this to the SML/NJ implementation of weak polymorphism through a series of type systems that incorporate elements of the SML/NJ type inference algorithm.

scholarly journals Type inference and strong static type checking for Promela

2010 ◽  
Vol 75 (11) ◽  
pp. 1165-1191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alastair F. Donaldson ◽  
Simon J. Gay
Keyword(s):  
Type Inference ◽  
Type Checking

Local type inference

2000 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin C. Pierce ◽  
David N. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Type Inference ◽  
Local Type

scholarly journals A Unified Type System for Object-Oriented Programming

1990 ◽  
Vol 19 (341) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Palsberg ◽  
Michael I. Schwartzbach
Keyword(s):  
Type System ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Type Systems ◽  
Object Oriented Programming ◽  
Type Checking ◽  
Separate Compilation ◽  
Set Inclusion ◽  
New Type ◽  
Efficient Type ◽  
Object Oriented Languages

We present a new type system for object-oriented languages with assignments. Types are sets of classes, subtyping is set inclusion, and genericity is class substitution. The type system enables separate compilation, and unifies, generalizes, and simplifies the type systems underlying SIMULA/BETA, C++, EIFFEL, and Typed Smalltalk, and the type system with type substitutions proposed by Palsberg and Schwartzbach, Classes and types are both modeled as node-labeled, ordered regular trees; this allows an efficient type-checking algorithm.

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