Abstract

Studies about types have influenced, in a significant way, the design and definition of programming languages. This survey presents an introductory overview of concepts related to types and type systems for modern programming languages. We introduce by identifying why types are useful, and go on to discuss the formalization of the syntax of programming languages by pointing out which properties should type systems satisfy, in particular with respect to denotational and operational semantic definitions. We provide an overview of simple type systems, polymorphic type systems, type inference, constrained polymorphism, subtyping and abstract types.

Citations