|
|
|
| e-Pub |
Previous | 
Home
Section: New Results
Language design and type systems
Types with unique inhabitants for code inference
Participants : Gabriel Scherer [Northeastern University] , Didier Rémy.
Some programming language features (coercions, type-classes, implicits) rely on inferring a part of the code that is determined by its usage context. In order to better understand the theoretical underpinnings of this mechanism, we ask: when is it the case that there is a unique program that could have been guessed, or in other words, that all possible guesses result in equivalent program fragments? Which types have a unique inhabitant?
To approach the question of uniqueness, we build on work in proof theory on canonical representations of proofs. Using the proofs-as-programs correspondence, we adapt the logical technique of focusing to obtain canonical program representations.
In the setting of simply-typed lambda-calculus with sums, equipped with the strong -equivalence, we show that uniqueness is decidable. We present a saturating focused logic that introduces irreducible cuts on positive types “as soon as possible”. Goal-directed proof search in this logic gives an effective algorithm that returns either zero, one or two distinct inhabitants for any given type.
This work, which was previously presented at a conference [56] and was the main part of Scherer's PhD dissertation [12], has been submitted for journal publication.
Refactoring with ornaments in ML
Participants : Thomas Williams, Didier Rémy.
Thomas Williams and Didier Rémy continued working on ornaments for program refactoring and program transformation in ML. Ornaments have been introduced as a way to describe some changes in data type definitions that preserve their recursive structure, reorganizing, adding, or dropping some pieces of data. After a new data structure has been described as an ornament of an older one, some functions operating on the bare structure can be partially or sometimes totally lifted into functions operating on the ornamented structure.
We have continued working on the decomposition of the algorithm in several steps. Using ornament inference, we first elaborate an ML program into a generic program, which can be seen as a template for all possible liftings of the original program. The generic program is defined in a superset of ML. It can then be instantiated with specific ornaments, and simplified back into an ML program. We studied the semantics of this intermediate language and used them to prove the correctness of the lifting, using logical relations techniques. A paper describing this process was submitted to PLDI.
On the practical side, we updated our prototype implementation to match our theoretical presentation: we create the generic program, then instantiate it. We then simplify the resulting term so that it remains readable to the programmer, and output an ML program. In the case of refactoring (the representation of a data type is modified without adding any data), the transformation is still fully automatic.