Article

Free access

Sound polymorphic type inference for objects

Authors:

Jonathan Eifrig,

Valery TrifonovAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '95: Proceedings of the tenth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications

Pages 169 - 184

https://doi.org/10.1145/217838.217858

Published: 17 October 1995 Publication History

Abstract

A polymorphic, constraint-based type inference algorithm for an object-oriented language is defined. A generalized form of type, polymorphic recursively constrained types, are inferred. These types are expressive enough for typing objects, since they generalize recursive types and F-bounded polymorphism. The well-known tradeoff between inheritance and subtyping is mitigated by the type inference mechanism. Soundness and completeness of type inference are established.

References

[1]

M. Abadi and L. Cardelli. A semantics of object types. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pages 332-341, 1994.

[2]

A. Aiken and E. L. Wimmers. Type inclusion constraints and type inference. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture, pages 31-41, 1993.

Digital Library

[3]

K. B. Bruce, J. Crabtree. T. P. Murtagh, R. van Gent, A. Dimock, and R. Muller. Safe and decidable type checking in an object-oriented language. In OOPSLA '93 Conference Proceedings, 1993.

Digital Library

[4]

Kim Bruce, Luca Cardelli, Giuseppe Castagna, The Hopkins Objects Group, Gary T. Leavens, and Benjamin Pierce. On binary methods. Technical Report TR95-08, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011-1040 USA. ftp://ftp.cs.iastate.edu/ pub/techreports/TR95-08/TR.ps. Z. 1995.

[5]

Kim B. Bruce, Angela Schuett, and Robert van Gent. Poly- TOIL: A type-safe polymorphic object-oriented language. In ECOOP '95, 1995.

Digital Library

[6]

P. Canning, W. Cook, W. Hill. J. Mitchell, and W. Olthoff. F- bounded polymorphism for object-oriented programming. In Proceedings of the Conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture, pages 273-280, 1989.

Digital Library

[7]

L. Cardelli. A semantics of multiple inheritance. In Semantics of Data Types, volume 173 of Lecture notes in Computer Science, pages 51-67. Springer-Verlag, 1984.

[8]

Giuseppe Castagna. Covariance and contravariance: conflict without a cause. A CM Transactions on Programmzng Languages and Systems, 17(3), 1995.

Digital Library

[9]

William R. Cook, Walter L. Hill, and Peter S. Canning. Inheritance is not subtyping. In Conference Record of the Seventeenth Annual A CM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. ACM Press, 1990.

Digital Library

[10]

Pavel Curtis. Constrained quantification in polymorphic type analysis. Technical Report CSL-90-1, XEROX Palo Alto Research Center, CSLPubs .pare~xerox. corn, 1990.

[11]

J. Eifrig, S. Smith, and V. Trifonov. Type inference for recursively constrained types and its application to OOP. In Proceedings of the 1995 Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics Conference, volume 1 of Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. Elsevier, 1995.

[12]

J. Eifrig, S. Smith, V. Trifonov, and A. Zwarico. Application of OOP type theory: State, decidability, integration. In OOPSLA '9~, pages 16-30, 1994.

[13]

Daniel H. H. Ingalls. A simple technique for handling multiple polymorphism. In OOPSLA '86 Conference Proceedings, Portland, Oregon, September 1986, volume 21(11), pages 347-349, November 1986.

Digital Library

[14]

S. Kaes. Type inference in the presence of overloading, subtyping and recursive types. In A CM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, pages 193-204, 1992.

Digital Library

[15]

Samuel N. Kamin and Uday S. Reddy. Two semantic models of object-oriented languages. In Carl A. Gunter and John C. Mitchell, editors, Theoretical Aspects of Object-Oriented Programming, chapter 13, pages 464-495. MIT Press, 1994.

Digital Library

[16]

R. Milner. A theory of type polymorphism in programming. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 17:348-375, 1978.

[17]

R. Milner, M. Torte, and R. Harper. The Definition o/Standard ML. MIT Press, 1990.

Digital Library

[18]

J. Mitchell. Coercion and type inference (summary). In Conference Record of the Eleventh Annual A CM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, 1984.

Digital Library

[19]

W. B. Mugridge, J. G. Hosking, and J. Hamer. Multi-methods in a statically-typed programming language. In Pierre America, editor, ECOOP '91 Conference Proceedings, Geneva, Switzerland, volume 512 of Lecture notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, 1991.

Digital Library

[20]

N. Oxhc~j, J. Palsberg, and M. I. Schwartzbach. Type inference with subtypes. In ECOOP'92 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, volume 615 of Lecture notes in Computer Science, pages 329-349. Springer-Verlag, 1992.

Digital Library

[21]

J. Palsberg and M. Schwartzbach. Object-Oriented Type Systems. Wiley, 1994.

Digital Library

[22]

Jens Palsberg and Michael I. Schwartzbach. Safety analysis versus type inference for partial types. Information Processing Letters, pages 175-180, 1992.

Digital Library

[23]

J. Plevyak and A. Chien. Precise concrete type inference for object-oriented languages. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual A CM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, pages 324-340, 1994.

Digital Library

[24]

J. C. Reynolds. Three approaches to type structure. In TAP- SOFT proceedings, volume 185 of Lecture notes in Computer Science, pages 97-138, 1985.

[25]

T. Sekiguchi and A. Yonezawa. A complete type inference system for subtyped recursive types. In Proc. Theoretical Aspects of Computer Software, volume 789 of Lecture Notes zn Computer Science, pages 667-686. Springer-Verlag, 1994.

[26]

Jean-Pierre Talpin and Pierre Jouvelot. The type and effect discipline. In Proceedings of the Seventh Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pages 162-173. IEEE, 1992.

[27]

M. Tofte. Type inference for polymorphic references. Information and Computation, 89:1-34, 1990.

Digital Library

[28]

Mitchell Wand. Complete type inference for simple objects. In Proceedings of the Second Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pages 37-44. IEEE, 1987.

Cited By

Ramsay SWalpole C(2024)Ill-Typed Programs Don’t EvaluateProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36329098:POPL(2010-2040)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632909
Cui CJiang SOliveira B(2023)Greedy Implicit Bounded QuantificationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228717:OOPSLA2(2083-2111)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622871
Parreaux LChau C(2022)MLstruct: principal type inference in a Boolean algebra of structural typesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35633046:OOPSLA2(449-478)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563304
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Sound polymorphic type inference for objects
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Control structures
      2. Language types
        Object oriented languages

Recommendations

Sound polymorphic type inference for objects

A polymorphic, constraint-based type inference algorithm for an object-oriented language is defined. A generalized form of type, polymorphic recursively constrained types, are inferred. These types are expressive enough for typing objects, since they ...
Polymorphic type inference
POPL '83: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages

The benefits of strong typing to disciplined programming, to compile-time error detection and to program verification are well known. Strong typing is especially natural for functional (applicative) languages, in which function application is the central ...
Type checking and inference for polymorphic and existential types
CATS '09: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Australasian Symposium on Computing: The Australasian Theory - Volume 94

This paper proves undecidability of type checking and type inference problems in some variants of typed lambda calculi with polymorphic and existential types. First, type inference in the domain-free polymorphic lambda calculus is proved to be ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

OOPSLA '95: Proceedings of the tenth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications

October 1995

496 pages

ISBN:0897917030

DOI:10.1145/217838

Chairman:
Robecca J. Wirfs-Brock
ParcPlace-Digitals, Inc.

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 30, Issue 10
Oct. 17, 1995
493 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/217839
Editor:
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
ParcPlace-Digitalk, Inc.
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1995 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 October 1995

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

OOPSLA95

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

OOPSLA95: Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications

October 15 - 19, 1995

Texas, Austin, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,244 submissions, 22%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

111
Total Citations
View Citations
669
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)82
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)18

Reflects downloads up to 12 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ramsay SWalpole C(2024)Ill-Typed Programs Don’t EvaluateProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36329098:POPL(2010-2040)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632909
Cui CJiang SOliveira B(2023)Greedy Implicit Bounded QuantificationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228717:OOPSLA2(2083-2111)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622871
Parreaux LChau C(2022)MLstruct: principal type inference in a Boolean algebra of structural typesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35633046:OOPSLA2(449-478)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563304
Wilkinson H(2019)VM support for live typingCompanion Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming10.1145/3328433.3328443(1-3)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3328433.3328443
Dolan SMycroft A(2017)Polymorphism, subtyping, and type inference in MLsubACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3093333.300988252:1(60-72)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3093333.3009882
Kilian MMonszpart AMitra N(2017)String Actuated Curved Folded SurfacesACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/301546036:3(1-13)Online publication date: 19-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3015460
Dolan SMycroft ACastagna GGordon A(2017)Polymorphism, subtyping, and type inference in MLsubProceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/3009837.3009882(60-72)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3009837.3009882
Jhaveri MCetin OGañán CMoore TEeten M(2017)Abuse Reporting and the Fight Against CybercrimeACM Computing Surveys10.1145/300314749:4(1-27)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3003147
Noonan MLoginov ACok D(2016)Polymorphic type inference for machine codeACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2980983.290811951:6(27-41)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2980983.2908119
Noonan MLoginov ACok DKrintz CBerger E(2016)Polymorphic type inference for machine codeProceedings of the 37th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/2908080.2908119(27-41)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2908080.2908119
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents