Abstract

This work is based on a proposal by Laufer and Odersky [3]. They show that it is possible to add existential types to an ML-like language without even modifying its syntax. ML's strong typing properties are of course retained. We implemented their proposal into Caml-Light 0.6 [4], thus making it possible to write realistic programs using existential types. The first part of this paper describes this simple form of existential types and showss how to use them in our enhanced version of Caml-Light. We then give several examples demonstrating their usefulness. Finally, a more technical section gives an overview of the changes made to the compiler and discusses some technical issues. Une impl'ementation de Caml-Light avec types existentiels R'esum'e Ce travail est fond'e sur une proposition de Laufer et Odersky [3] montrant l'adjonction de types existentiels aux langages ML sans modification de la syntaxe de ces langages. Les propri 'et'es du typage fort de ML sont bien sur pr'...

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