International Conference on Functional Programming 2017

Justin Pombrio (Brown University, USA) gives the third talk in the fifth panel, Inference and Analysis on the 3rd day of the ICFP conference. Co-written by Shriram Krishnamurthi (Brown University, USA) and Mitchell Wand (Northeastern University, USA). Many languages use syntactic sugar to define parts of their surface language in terms of a smaller core. Thus some properties of the surface language, like its scoping rules, are not immediately evident. Nevertheless, IDEs, refactorers, and other tools that traffic in source code depend on these rules to present information to users and to soundly perform their operations. In this paper, we show how to lift scoping rules defined on a core language to rules on the surface, a process of scope inference. In the process we introduce a new representation of binding structure--scope as a preorder--and present a theoretical advance: proving that a desugaring system preserves alpha-equivalence even though scoping rules have been provided only for the core language. We have also implemented the system presented in this paper.

Martin Avanzini (University of Innsbruck, Austria) gives the second talk in the fifth panel, Inference and Analysis on the 3rd day of the ICFP conference. This paper introduces a new methodology for the complexity analysis of higher-order functional programs, which is based on three ingredients: a powerful type system for size analysis and a sound type inference procedure for it, a ticking monadic transformation and constraint solving. Noticeably, the presented methodology can be fully automated, and is able to analyse a series of examples which cannot be handled by most competitor methodologies. This is possible due to various key ingredients, and in particular an abstract index language and index polymorphism at higher ranks. A prototype implementation is available.

Richard A. Eisenberg (Bryn Mawr College, USA) gives the first talk in the fifth panel, Inference and Analysis, on the 3rd day of the ICFP conference. Co-written by J. Garrett Morris (University of Kansas, USA). We present an approach to support partiality in type-level computation without compromising expressiveness or type safety. Existing frameworks for type-level computation either require totality or implicitly assume it. For example, type families in Haskell provide a powerful, modular means of defining type-level computation. However, their current design implicitly assumes that type families are total, introducing nonsensical types and significantly complicating the metatheory of type families and their extensions. We propose an alternative design, using qualified types to pair type-level computations with predicates that capture their domains. Our approach naturally captures the intuitive partiality of type families, simplifying their metatheory. As evidence, we present the first complete proof of consistency for a language with closed type families.

Victor Lanvin (ENS Cachan, France) gives the third talk in the fourth panel, Integrating Static and Dynamic Typing, on the 3rd day of the ICFP conference. Co-written by Giuseppe Castagna (CNRS, University of Paris Diderot). We propose a type system for functional languages with gradual types and set-theoretic type connectives and prove its soundness. In particular, we show how to lift the definition of the domain and result type of an application from non-gradual types to gradual ones and likewise for the subtyping relation. We also show that deciding subtyping for gradual types can be reduced in linear time to deciding subtyping on non-gradual types and that the same holds true for all subtyping-related decision problems that must be solved for type inference. More generally, this work not only enriches gradual type systems with unions and intersections and with the type precision that arise from their use, but also proposes and advocates a new style of gradual types programming where union and intersection types are used by programmers to instruct the system to perform fewer dynamic checks.

Yuu Igarashi (Kyoto University, Japan) gives the second talk in the fourth panel, Integrating Static and Dynamic Typing, on the 3rd day of the ICFP conference. Co-written by Taro Sekiyama (IBM Research, Japan), Atsushi Igarashi (Kyoto University, Japan). We study an extension of gradual typing--a method to integrate dynamic typing and static typing smoothly in a single language--to parametric polymorphism and its theoretical properties, including conservativity of typing and semantics over both statically and dynamically typed languages, type safety, blame-subtyping theorem, and the gradual guarantee--the so-called refined criteria, advocated by Siek et al. We develop System F-G, which is a gradually typed extension of System F with the dynamic type and a new type consistency relation, and translation to a new polymorphic blame calculus System F-C, which is based on previous polymorphic blame calculi by Ahmed et al. The design of System F-G and System F-C, geared to the criteria, is influenced by the distinction between static and gradual type variables, first observed by Garcia and Cimini. This distinction is also useful to execute statically typed code without incurring additional overhead to manage type names as in the prior calculi. We prove that System F-G satisfies most of the criteria: all but the hardest property of the gradual guarantee on semantics. We show that a key conjecture to prove the gradual guarantee leads to the Jack-of-All-Trades property, conjectured as an important property of the polymorphic blame calculus by Ahmed et al.