Abstract

) Shail Aditya MIT Laboratory for Computer Science 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139 shail@abp.lcs.mit.edu 1 Introduction Polymorphic programming languages provide the flexibility of code reuse by allowing objects with different types to share the same pattern of computation. But, this feature creates problems for applications like garbage collection and source debugging that need to know the exact type of every object participating in a computation at run-time. Traditionally, dynamic objects in a polymorphic language keep additional type-tags to identify themselves. But, this scheme either requires complex hardware support or costs space and time overhead in managing the tags in software. This paper [1] proposes a compiler-directed, explicit tag management scheme for Id, which is a polymorphic, stronglytyped language developed by the Computation Structures Group at MIT. The underlying memory model for Id is tagless, and the explicit tag information is automatically inser...

Citations

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