Abstract

Static type systems are traditionally used to prevent run-time type-errors in user programs and to assign appropriate storage representations to objects during compilation. In this thesis, we explore some new ways of using static type information in the design, compilation, and execution of programs written in a strongly-typed, polymorphic language. Programmers often find it useful to know whether or not a particular data-structure may be updated outside a given control block. Information about an object's non-mutability helps compiler optimizations, improves aliasing and dependence analyses, and permits unrestricted caching of functional data at run-time. In the first part of this thesis, we present a safe, static mechanism for functional encapsulation of imperative data-structures using a powerful type system based on closure types and regions. We introduce a new language construct called close which delimits the scope of side-effects on imperative objects and converts them into fun...

Citations