We demonstrate the pragmatic value of the principal typing property, a property more general than ML's principal type property, by studying a type system with principal typings. The type system is based on rank 2 intersection types and is closely related to ML. Its principal typing property provides elegant support for separate compilation, including "smartest recompilation" and incremental type inference, and for accurate type error messages. Moreover, it motivates a novel rule for typing recursive definitions that can type many examples of polymorphic recursion.

Note: This document accompanies the paper “Practical type inference for arbitrary-rank types ” [6]. Prior reading of the main paper is required. 1 Contents

Let S be some type system. A typing in S for a typable term M is the collection of all of the information other than M which appears in the final judgement of a proof derivation showing that M is typable. For example, suppose there is a derivation in S ending with the judgement A M : # meaning that M has result type # when assuming the types of free variables are given by A. Then (A, #) is a typing for M .

Girard and Reynolds independently invented System F (a.k.a. the second-order polymorphically typed lambda calculus) to handle problems in logic and computer programming language design, respectively. Viewing F in the Curry style, which associates types with untyped lambda terms, raises the questions of typability and type checking . Typability asks for a term whether there exists some type it can be given. Type checking asks, for a particular term and type, whether the term can be given that type. The decidability of these problems has been settled for restrictions and extensions of F and related systems and complexity lower-bounds have been determined for typability in F, but this report is the rst to resolve whether these problems are decidable for System F. This report proves that type checking in F is undecidable, by a reduction from semiuni cation, and that typability in F is undecidable, by a reduction from type checking. Because there is an easy reduction from typability to typ...

Principality of typings is the property that for each typable term, there is a typing from which all other typings are obtained via some set of operations. Type inference is the problem of finding a typing for a given term, if possible. We define an intersection type system which has principal typings and types exactly the strongly normalizable -terms. More interestingly, every finite-rank restriction of this system (using Leivant's first notion of rank) has principal typings and also has decidable type inference. This is in contrast to System F where the finite rank restriction for every finite rank at 3 and above has neither principal typings nor decidable type inference. This is also in contrast to earlier presentations of intersection types where the status (decidable or undecidable) of these properties is unknown for the finiterank restrictions at 3 and above. Furthermore, the notion of principal typings for our system involves only one operation, substitution, rather than severa...

In this paper, we propose to extend the Barendregt Cube by generalising reduction and by adding definition mechanisms. We show that this extension satisfies all the original properties of the Cube including Church Rosser, Subject Reduction and Strong Normalisation. Keywords: Generalised Reduction, Definitions, Barendregt Cube, Church Rosser, Subject Reduction, Strong Normalisation. Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Why generalised reduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2 Why definition mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3 The item notation for definitions and generalised reduction . . . . . . . . . . 4 2 The item notation 7 3 The ordinary typing relation and its properties 10 3.1 The typing relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.2 Properties of the ordinary typing relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 4 Generalising reduction in the Cube 15 4.1 The generalised...

We present # CIL , a typed #-calculus which serves as the foundation for a typed intermediate language for optimizing compilers for higher-order polymorphic programming languages. The key innovation of # CIL is a novel formulation of intersection and union types and flow labels on both terms and types. These flow types can encode polyvariant control and data flow information within a polymorphically typed program representation. Flow types can guide a compiler in generating customized data representations in a strongly typed setting. Since # CIL enjoys confluence, standardization, and subject reduction properties, it is a valuable tool for reasoning about programs and program transformations.

Principality of typings is the property that for each typable term, there is a typing from which all other typings are obtained via some set of operations. Type inference is the problem of finding a typing for a given term, if possible. We define an intersection type system which has principal typings and types exactly the strongly normalizable #-terms. More interestingly, every finite-rank restriction of this system (using Leivant's first notion of rank) has principal typings and also has decidable type inference.

We demonstrate an equivalence between the rank 2 fragments of the polymorphic lambda calculus (System F) and the intersection type discipline: exactly the same terms are typable in each system. An immediate consequence is that typability in the rank 2 intersection system is DEXPTIME-complete. We introduce a rank 2 system combining intersections and polymorphism, and prove that it types exactly the same terms as the other rank 2 systems. The combined system suggests a new rule for typing recursive definitions. The result is a rank 2 type system with decidable type inference that can type some interesting examples of polymorphic recursion. Finally,we discuss some applications of the type system in data representation optimizations such as unboxing and overloading.

We investigate finite-rank intersection type systems, analyzing the complexity of their type inference problems and their relation to the problem of recognizing semantically equivalent terms. Intersection types allow something of type T1 /\ T2 to be used in some places at type T1 and in other places at type T2 . A finite-rank intersection type system bounds how deeply the /\ can appear in type expressions. Such type systems enjoy strong normalization, subject reduction, and computable type inference, and they support a pragmatics for implementing parametric polymorphism. As a consequence, they provide a conceptually simple and tractable alternative to the impredicative polymorphism of System F and its extensions, while typing many more programs than the Hindley-Milner type system found in ML and Haskell. While type inference is computable at every rank, we show that its complexity grows exponentially as rank increases. Let K(0, n) = n and K(t + 1, n) = 2^K(t,n); we prove that recognizing the pure lambda-terms of size n that are typable at rank k is complete for dtime[K(k-1, n)]. We then consider the problem of deciding whether two lambda-terms typable at rank k have the same normal form, Generalizing a well-known result of Statman from simple types to finite-rank intersection types. ...