Departmental Papers (CIS)
Document Type
Conference Paper
Date of this Version
September 2008
Abstract
Languages supporting polymorphism typically have ad-hoc restrictions on where polymorphic types may occur. Supporting "first class" polymorphism, by lifting those restrictions, is obviously desirable, but it is hard to achieve this without sacrificing type inference. We present a new type system for higher-rank and impredicative polymorphism that improves on earlier proposals: it is an extension of Damas-Milner; it relies only on System F types; it has a simple, declarative specification; it is robust to program transformations; and it enjoys a complete and decidable type inference algorithm.
Keywords
higher-rank types, impredicativity, type inference
COinS
Date Posted: 27 October 2008
This document has been peer reviewed.
Comments
Postprint version. Published in ICFP '08 Proceedings of the 2008 SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, Volume 43, Issue 9, September 2008, pages 295-306. Publisher URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1411203.1411246