Abstract

Formal calculi of record structures have recently been a focus of active research. However, scarcely anyone has studied formally the dual notion---i.e., argument-passing to functions by keywords, and its harmonization with currying. We have. Recently, we introduced the label-selective -calculus, a conservative extension of -calculus that uses a labeling of abstractions and applications to perform unordered currying. In other words, it enables some form of commutation between arguments. This improves program legibility, thanks to the presence of labels, and efficiency, thanks to argument commuting. In this paper, we propose a simply typed version of the calculus, then extend it to one with ML-like polymorphic types. For the latter calculus, we establish the existence of principal types and we give an algorithm to compute them. Thanks to the fact that label-selective -calculus is a conservative extension of -calculus by adding numeric labels to stand for argument positions, its...

Citations