The Hindley/Milner type system has been widely adopted as a basis for statically typed functional languages. One of the main reasons for this is that it provides an elegant compromise between flexibility, allowing a single value to be used in different ways, and practicality, freeing the programmer from the need to supply explicit type information. Focusing on practical applications rather than implementation or theoretical details, these notes examine a range of extensions that provide more flexible type systems while retaining many of the properties that have made the original Hindley/Milner system so popular. The topics discussed, some old, but most quite recent, include higher-order polymorphism and type and constructor class overloading. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of these features to promote modularity and reusability.

Folds are appreciated by functional programmers. Their dual, unfolds, are not new, but they are not nearly as well appreciated. We believe they deserve better. To illustrate, we present (indeed, we calculate) a number of algorithms for computing the breadth-first traversal of a tree. We specify breadth-first traversal in terms of level-order traversal, which we characterize first as a fold. The presentation as a fold is simple, but it is inefficient, and removing the inefficiency makes it no longer a fold. We calculate a characterization as an unfold from the characterization as a fold; this unfold is equally clear, but more efficient. We also calculate a characterization of breadth-first traversal directly as an unfold; this turns out to be the `standard' queue-based algorithm.

. An SPMD parallel implementation schema for divide-and-conquer specifications is proposed and derived by formal refinement (transformation) of the specification. The specification is in the form of a mutually recursive functional definition. In a first phase, a parallel functional program schema is constructed which consists of a communication tree and a functional program that is shared by all nodes of the tree. The fact that this phase proceeds by semanticspreserving transformations in the Bird-Meertens formalism of higher-order functions guarantees the correctness of the resulting functional implementation. A second phase yields an imperative distributed message-passing implementation of this schema. The derivation process is illustrated with an example: a twodimensional numerical integration algorithm. 1. Introduction One of the main problems in exploiting modern multiprocessor systems is how to develop correct and efficient programs for them. We address this problem using the ap...

Abstract. Some total languages, like Agda and Coq, allow the use of guarded corecursion to construct infinite values and proofs. Guarded corecursion is a form of recursion in which arbitrary recursive calls are allowed, as long as they are guarded by a coinductive constructor. Guardedness ensures that programs are productive, i.e. that every finite prefix of an infinite value can be computed in finite time. However, many productive programs are not guarded, and it can be nontrivial to put them in guarded form. This paper gives a method for turning a productive program into a guarded program. The method amounts to defining a problem-specific language as a data type, writing the program in the problem-specific language, and writing a guarded interpreter for this language. 1

Circular functional programs (necessarily evaluated lazily) have been used as algorithmic tools, as attribute grammar implementations, and as target for program transformation techniques. Classically, Richard Bird [1984] showed how to transform certain multitraversal programs (which could be evaluated strictly or lazily) into one-traversal ones using circular bindings. Can we go the other way, even for programs that are not in the image of his technique? That is the question we pursue in this paper. We develop an approach that on the one hand lets us deal with typical examples corresponding to attribute grammars, but on the other hand also helps to derive new algorithms for problems not previously in reach.