Polymorphic typechecking

April 12, 2015

By Scott

Thanks everyone for a great session on Friday!

Leo expertly wrangled us through Cardelli’s “Basic Polymorphic Typechecking” paper. Then for show-and-tell Pete showed us his type inferencer in Haskell (This was awesome Pete!) and Dann gave a super fast intro to the typed forth environment he was working on.

Next week, Friday April 17th, 6:30 pm @ Bento Miso we will be discussing the first 2 sections of Milner’s paper, “A Theory of Type Polymorphism in Programming”.

Lots of interesting conversation, for instance the sentence, “so does type have type type”, merited significant debate, and I still feel the full implications of it haven’t fully sunk in for me. Thankfully, out of context it sounds ridicululous so no will be paying attention anyway. Leo’s notes are available on the github repo to help anyone else interpret the paper, https://github.com/CompSciCabal/SMRTYPRTY/blob/master/papers/cardelli–basic-polymorphic-typechecking.md .

I really appreciated Pete taking us for a tour through his nifty Haskell implementation of the type inferencer based on the Modula 2 code from the paper (https://github.com/pbevin/cardelli), I found it really helped me understand some of the aspects of the unification and inference algorithm they discuss in the paper.

See you all next week, Scott