Cornell University
Library
Cornell UniversityLibrary

eCommons

Help
Log In(current)
  1. Home
  2. Cornell Computing and Information Science
  3. Computer Science
  4. Computer Science Technical Reports
  5. Intensional Polymorphism in Type-Erasure Semantics

Intensional Polymorphism in Type-Erasure Semantics

File(s)
98-1721.ps (432.62 KB)
98-1721.pdf (194.76 KB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/7375
Collections
Computer Science Technical Reports
Author
Crary, Karl
Weirich, Stephanie
Morrisett, Greg
Abstract

Intensional polymorphism, the ability to dispatch to different routines based on types at run time, enables a variety of advanced implementation techniques for polymorphic languages, including tag-free garbage collection, unboxed function arguments, polymorphic marshalling, and flattened data structures. To date, languages that support intensional polymorphism have required a type-passing (as opposed to type-erasure) interpretation where types are constructed and passed to polymorphic functions at run time. Unfortunately, type-passing suffers from a number of drawbacks: it requires duplication of constructs at the term and type levels, it prevents abstraction, and it severely complicates polymorphic closure conversion. We present a type-theoretic framework that supports intensional polymorphism, but avoids many of the disadvantages of type passing. In our approach, run-time type information is represented by ordinary terms. This avoids the duplication problem, allows us to recover abstraction, and avoids complications with closure conversion. In addition, our type system provides another improvement in expressiveness; it allows unknown types to be refined in place thereby avoiding certain beta-expansions required by other frameworks.

Date Issued
1998-11
Publisher
Cornell University
Keywords
computer science
•
technical report
Previously Published as
http://techreports.library.cornell.edu:8081/Dienst/UI/1.0/Display/cul.cs/TR98-1721
Type
technical report

Site Statistics | Help

About eCommons | Policies | Terms of use | Contact Us

copyright © 2002-2026 Cornell University Library | Privacy | Web Accessibility Assistance