A Syntactic Approach to Type Soundness

A Syntactic Approach to Type Soundness (1992)

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by Andrew K. Wright , Matthias Felleisen

Venue:	Information and Computation
Citations:	490 - 20 self

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Datum	Value	Source
TITLE	A Syntactic Approach to Type Soundness	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR NAME	Andrew K. Wright	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR ADDR	Houston, TX 77251-1892	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR NAME	Matthias Felleisen	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR ADDR	Houston, TX 77251-1892	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
ABSTRACT	We present a new approach to proving type soundness for Hindley/Milner-style polymorphic type systems. The keys to our approach are (1) an adaptation of subject reduction theorems from combinatory logic to programming languages, and (2) the use of rewriting techniques for the specification of the language semantics. The approach easily extends from polymorphic functional languages to imperative languages that provide references, exceptions, continuations, and similar features. We illustrate the technique with a type soundness theorem for the core of Standard ML, which includes the first type soundness proof for polymorphic exceptions and continuations. 1 Type Soundness Static type systems for programming languages attempt to prevent the occurrence of type errors during execution. A definition of type error depends on a specific language and type system, but always includes the use of a function on arguments for which it is not defined, and the attempted application of a non-function. A static type system is sound if well-typed programs cannot cause type errors; a programming language with a sound static type system is strongly typed [7]. While it is easy to design a sound type system for an explicitly typed monomorphic language, the formulation of a sound type system for a language based on Hindley/Milnerstyle polymorphism and type inference is delicate [6, 8, 15, 17, 20, 37]. Although the treatment of purely functional languages is relatively well understood in this framework, the incorporation of imperative features such as references and exceptions requires extreme care, and the soundness of such systems is not obvious. A formal proof of soundness is	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
CITATIONS	38 found	ParsCit 1.0