Lambda the Ultimate

Strongly-Typed Language Support for Internet-Scale Information Sources

Don Syme, Keith Battocchi, Kenji Takeda(1), Donna Malayeri, Jomo Fisher, Jack Hu, Tao Liu, Brian McNamara, Daniel Quirk, Matteo Taveggia, Wonseok Chae, Uladzimir Matsveyeu(2), Tomas Petricek(3)

1 Microsoft Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom
2 Microsoft Corporation, Redmond WA, USA
3 University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Abstract:

...Most modern applications incorporate one or more external information sources as integral components. Providing strongly typed access to these sources is a key consideration for strongly-typed programming languages, to insure low impedance mismatch in information access...

In this report we describe the design and implementation of the type provider mechanism in F# 3.0 and its applications to typed programming with web ontologies, web-services, systems management information, database mappings, data markets, content management systems, economic data and hosted scripting. Type soundness becomes relative to the soundness of the type providers and the schema change in information sources, but the role of types in information-rich programming tasks is massively expanded, especially through tooling that benefits from rich types in explorative programming.

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