A quick look at impredicativity

Alejandro Serrano, Jurriaan Hage, Simon Peyton Jones, Dimitrios Vytiniotis

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

    Abstract

    Type inference for parametric polymorphism is wildly successful, but has always suffered from an embarrassing flaw: polymorphic types are themselves not first class. We present Quick Look, a practical, implemented, and deployable design for impredicative type inference. To demonstrate our claims, we have modified GHC, a production-quality Haskell compiler, to support impredicativity. The changes required are modest, localised, and are fully compatible with GHC's myriad other type system extensions.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number89
    Pages (from-to)1-29
    JournalProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
    Volume4
    Issue numberICFP
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2 Aug 2020

    Keywords

    • constraint-based inference
    • impredicative polymorphism
    • Type systems

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