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Types for Flexible ObjectsTypes for Flexible Objects, by Pottayil Harisanker Menon, Zachary Palmer, Alexander Rozenshteyn, Scott Smith:
An interesting paper I stumbled across quite by accident, it purports quite an ambitious set of features: generalizing previous work on first-class cases while supporting subtyping, mutation, and polymorphism all with full type inference, in an effort to match the flexibility of dynamically typed languages. It does so by introducing a host of new concepts that are almost-but-not-quite generalizations of existing concepts, like "onions" which are kind of a type-indexed extensible record, and "scapes" which are sort of a generalization of pattern matching cases. Instead of approaching objects via a record calculus, they approach it using its dual as variant matching. Matching functions then have degenerate dependent types, which I first saw in the paper Type Inference for First-Class Messages with Match-Functions. Interesting aside, Scott Smith was a coauthor on this last paper too, but it isn't referenced in the "flexible objects" paper, despite the fact that "scapes" are "match-functions". Overall, quite a dense and ambitous paper, but the resulting TinyBang language looks very promising and quite expressive. Future work includes making the system more modular, as it currently requires whole program compilation, and adding first-class labels, which in past work has led to interesting results as well. Most work exploiting row polymorphism is particularly interesting because it supports efficient compilation to index-passing code for both records and variants. It's not clear if onions and scapes are also amenable to this sort of translation. Edit: a previous paper was published in 2012, A Practical, Typed Variant Object Model -- Or, How to Stand On Your Head and Enjoy the View. BigBang is their language that provides syntactic sugar on top of TinyBang. Edit 2: commas fixed, thanks! By naasking at 2013-09-04 16:57 | Meta-Programming | Object-Functional | Theory | Type Theory | other blogs | 26891 reads
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