Our objective is to understand the notion of type in programming languages, present a model of typed, polymorphic programming languages that reflects recent research in type theory, and examine the relevance of recent research to the design of practical programming languages. Object-oriented languages provide both a framework and a motivation for exploring the interaction among the concepts of type, data abstraction, and polymorphism, since they extend the notion of type to data abstraction and since type inheritance is an important form of polymorphism. We develop a λ-calculus-based model for type systems that allows us to explore these interactions in a simple setting, unencumbered by complexities of production programming languages. The evolution of languages from untyped universes to monomorphic and then polymorphic type systems is reviewed. Mechanisms for polymorphism such as overloading, coercion, subtyping, and parameterization are examined. A unifying framework for polymorphic type systems is developed in terms of the typed λ-calculus augmented to include binding of types by quantification as well as binding of values by abstraction. The typed λ-calculus is augmented by universal quantification to model generic functions with type parameters, existential quantification and packaging (information hiding) to model abstract data types, and

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We present a new approach to proving type soundness for Hindley/Milner-style polymorphic type systems. The keys to our approach are (1) an adaptation of subject reduction theorems from combinatory logic to programming languages, and (2) the use of rewriting techniques for the specification of the language semantics. The approach easily extends from polymorphic functional languages to imperative languages that provide references, exceptions, continuations, and similar features. We illustrate the technique with a type soundness theorem for the core of Standard ML, which includes the first type soundness proof for polymorphic exceptions and continuations. 1 Type Soundness Static type systems for programming languages attempt to prevent the occurrence of type errors during execution. A definition of type error depends on a specific language and type system, but always includes the use of a function on arguments for which it is not defined, and the attempted application of a non-function. ...

This paper presents type classes, a new approach to ad-hoc polymorphism. Type classes permit overloading of arithmetic operators such as multiplication, and generalise the "eqtype variables" of Standard ML. Type classes extend the Hindley/Milner polymorphic type system, and provide a new approach to issues that arise in object-oriented programming, bounded type quantification, and abstract data types. This paper provides an informal introduction to type classes, and defines them formally by means of type inference rules. 1 Introduction Strachey chose the adjectives ad-hoc and parametric to distinguish two varieties of polymorphism [Str67]. Ad-hoc polymorphism occurs when a function is defined over several different types, acting in a different way for each type. A typical example is overloaded multiplication: the same symbol may be used to denote multiplication of integers (as in 3*3) and multiplication of floating point values (as in 3.14*3.14). Parametric polymorphism occurs wh...

We study Girard's Linear Logic from the point of view of giving a concrete computational interpretation of the logic, based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism. In the case of Intuitionistic Linear Logic, this leads to a refinement of the lambda calculus, giving finer control over order of evaluation and storage allocation, while maintaining the logical content of programs as proofs, and computation as cut-elimination.

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The design of a module system for constructing and main- taining large programs is a difficult task that raises a number of theoretical and practical issues. A fundamental issue is the management of the flow of information between program units at compile time via the notion of an interface. Experience has shown that fully opaque interfaces are awkward to use in practice since too much information is hidden, and that fully transparent interfaces lead to excessive interdependencies, creating problems for maintenance and separate compilation. The "sharing" specifications of Standard ML address this issue by allowing the programmer to specify equational relationships between types in separate modules, but are not expressive enough to allow the programmer com- plete control over the propagation of type information be- tween modules.

The π-calculus offers an attractive basis for concurrent programming. It is small, elegant, and well studied, and supports (via simple encodings) a wide range of high-level constructs including data structures, higher-order functional programming, concurrent control structures, and objects. Moreover, familiar type systems for the -calculus have direct counterparts in the π-calculus, yielding strong, static typing for a high-level language using the π-calculus as its core. This paper describes Pict, a strongly-typed concurrent programming language constructed in terms of an explicitly-typed-calculus core language.

This paper presents a variant of the SML module system that introduces a strict distinction between abstract types and manifest types (types whose de nitions are part of the module speci cation), while retaining most of the expressive power of the SML module system. The resulting module system provides much better support for separate compilation. 1

This paper presents an overview of the programming language Modula-3, and a more detailed description of its type system. 1