Type-Theoretic Methodology For Practical Programming Languages

Type-Theoretic Methodology For Practical Programming Languages (1998)

Cached

Download Links

by Karl Fredrick Crary

Venue:	DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY
Citations:	22 - 3 self

Versions

Version History

Metadata Version 4

User correction supplied by mph

Datum	Value	Source
TITLE	Type-Theoretic Methodology For Practical Programming Languages	user correction - Legacy Corrections
AUTHOR NAME	Karl Fredrick Crary	user correction
AUTHOR AFFIL	Cornell University	user correction
ABSTRACT	The significance of type theory to the theory of programming languages has long been recognized. Advances in programming languages have often derived from understanding that stems from type theory. However, these applications of type theory to practical programming languages have been indirect; the differences between practical languages and type theory have prevented direct connections between the two. This dissertation presents systematic techniques directly relating practical programming languages to type theory. These techniques allow programming languages to be interpreted in the rich mathematical domain of type theory. Such interpretations lead to semantics that are at once denotational and operational, combining the advantages of each, and they also lay the foundation for formal verification of computer programs in type theory. Previous type theories either have not provided adequate expressiveness to interpret practical languages, or have provided such expressiveness at the expense of essential features of the type theory. In particular, no previous type theory has supported a notion of partial functions (needed to interpret recursion in practical languages), and a notion of total functions and objects (needed to reason about data values), and an intrinsic notion of equality (needed for most interesting results). This dissertation presents the first type theory incorporating all three, and discusses issues arising in the design of that type theory. This type theory is used as the target of a typetheoretic semantics for a expressive programming calculus. This calculus may serve as an internal language for a variety of functional programming languages. The semantics is stated as a syntaxdirected embedding of the programming calculus into type theory. A critical point arising in both the type theory and the typetheoretic semantics is the issue of admissibility. Admissibility governs what types it is legal to form recursive functions over. To build a useful type theory for partial functions it is necessary to have a wide class of admissible types. In particular, it is necessary for all the types arising in the typetheoretic semantics to be admissible. In this dissertation I present a class of admissible types that is considerably wider than any previously known class.	user correction - Legacy Corrections
YEAR	1998	INFERENCE
VENUE	DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY	user correction
VENUE TYPE	TECHREPORT	INFERENCE
TECH	PhD thesis	INFERENCE
CITATIONS	84 found	ParsCit 1.0