Bidirectional typing combines two modes of typing: type checking, which checks that a program satisfies a known type, and type synthesis, which determines a type from the program. Using checking enables bidirectional typing to support features for which inference is undecidable; using synthesis enables bidirectional typing to avoid the large annotation burden of explicitly typed languages. In addition, bidirectional typing improves error locality. We highlight the design principles that underlie bidirectional type systems, survey the development of bidirectional typing from the prehistoric period before Pierce and Turner's local type inference to the present day, and provide guidance for future investigations.
This article presents a bidirectional type system for the Calculus of Inductive Constructions (CIC). It introduces a new judgement intermediate between the usual inference and checking, dubbed constrained inference, to handle the presence of computation in types. The key property of the system is its completeness with respect to the usual undirected one, which has been formally proven in Coq as a part of the MetaCoq project. Although it plays an important role in an ongoing completeness proof for a realistic typing algorithm, the interest of bidirectionality is wider, as it gives insights and …
Bidirectional typechecking, in which terms either synthesize a type or are checked against a known type, has become popular for its applicability to a variety of type systems, its error reporting, and its ease of implementation. Following principles from proof theory, bidirectional typing can be applied to many type constructs. The principles underlying a bidirectional approach to indexed types (generalized algebraic datatypes) are less clear. Building on proof-theoretic treatments of equality, we give a declarative specification of typing based on focalization. This approach permits declarati…
We introduce a new compile-time notion of type subsumption based on type simulation. We show how to apply this static subsumption relation to support a more intuitive, object oriented approach to generic programming of reusable, high performance container types. As a first step towards an efficient implementation of the resulting type system in a compiler we present a novel algorithm for bidirectional type inference over arbitrary syntax graphs. The algorithm uses the new static type subsumption relation to compress the data that has to be stored for each node in the typeflow graph. During typ…
Bidirectional typechecking, in which terms either synthesize a type or are checked against a known type, has become popular for its scalability (unlike Damas-Milner type inference, bidirectional typing remains decidable even for very expressive type systems), its error reporting, and its relative ease of implementation. Following design principles from proof theory, bidirectional typing can be applied to many type constructs. The principles underlying a bidirectional approach to polymorphism, however, are less obvious. We give a declarative, bidirectional account of higher-rank polymorphism, g…
Modern languages are equipped with static type checking/inference that helps programmers to keep a clean programming style and to reduce errors. However, the ever-growing size of programs and their continuous evolution require building fast and efficient analysers. A promising solution is incrementality, so one only re-types those parts of the program that are new, rather than the entire codebase. We propose an algorithmic schema driving the definition of an incremental typing algorithm that exploits the existing, standard ones with no changes. Ours is a grey-box approach, meaning that just th…
We present a type checking algorithm for establishing a session-based discipline in the pi calculus of Milner, Parrow and Walker. Our session types are qualified as linear or unrestricted. Linearly typed communication channels are guaranteed to occur in exactly one thread, possibly multiple times; afterwards they evolve as unrestricted channels. Session protocols are described by a type constructor that denotes the two ends of one and the same communication channel. We ensure the soundness of the algorithm by showing that processes consuming all linear resources are accepted by a type system p…
Relational type systems have been designed for several applications including information flow, differential privacy, and cost analysis. In order to achieve the best results, these systems often use relational refinements and relational effects to maximally exploit the similarity in the structure of the two programs being compared. Relational type systems are appealing for relational properties because they deliver simpler and more precise verification than what could be derived from typing the two programs separately. However, relational type systems do not yet achieve the practical appeal of…
Tensor shape mismatch is a common source of bugs in deep learning programs. We propose a new type-based approach to detect tensor shape mismatches. One of the main features of our approach is the best-effort shape inference. As the tensor shape inference problem is undecidable in general, we allow static type/shape inference to be performed only in a best-effort manner. If the static inference cannot guarantee the absence of the shape inconsistencies, dynamic checks are inserted into the program. Another main feature is gradual typing, where users can improve the precision of the inference by …
We present a prescriptive type system with parametric polymorphism and subtyping for constraint logic programs. The aim of this type system is to detect programming errors statically. It introduces a type discipline for constraint logic programs and modules, while maintaining the capabilities of performing the usual coercions between constraint domains, and of typing meta-programming predicates, thanks to the flexibility of subtyping. The property of subject reduction expresses the consistency of a prescriptive type system w.r.t. the execution model: if a program is "well-typed", then all deri…
In this paper, we describe our experience incorporating gradual types in a statically typed functional language with Hindley-Milner style type inference. Where most gradually typed systems aim to improve static checking in a dynamically typed language, we approach it from the opposite perspective and promote dynamic checking in a statically typed language. Our approach provides a glimpse into how languages like SML and OCaml might handle gradual typing. We discuss our implementation and challenges faced -- specifically how gradual typing rules apply to our representation of composite and recur…
A type system combining type application, constants as types, union types (associative, commutative and idempotent) and recursive types has recently been proposed for statically typing path polymorphism, the ability to define functions that can operate uniformly over recursively specified applicative data structures. A typical pattern such functions resort to is $x\,y$ which decomposes a compound, in other words any applicative tree structure, into its parts. We study type-checking for this type system in two stages. First we propose algorithms for checking type equivalence and subtyping based…
Stencil computations, involving operations over the elements of an array, are a common programming pattern in scientific computing, games, and image processing. As a programming pattern, stencil computations are highly regular and amenable to optimisation and parallelisation. However, general-purpose languages obscure this regular pattern from the compiler, and even the programmer, preventing optimisation and obfuscating (in)correctness. This paper furthers our work on the Ypnos domain-specific language for stencil computations embedded in Haskell. Ypnos allows declarative, abstract specificat…
A long-standing shortcoming of statically typed functional languages is that type checking does not rule out pattern-matching failures (run-time match exceptions). Refinement types distinguish different values of datatypes; if a program annotated with refinements passes type checking, pattern-matching failures become impossible. Unfortunately, refinement is a monolithic property of a type, exacerbating the difficulty of adding refinement types to nontrivial programs. Gradual typing has explored how to incrementally move between static typing and dynamic typing. We develop a type system of grad…
This paper addresses compositional and incremental type checking for object-oriented programming languages. Recent work achieved incremental type checking for structurally typed functional languages through co-contextual typing rules, a constraint-based formulation that removes any context dependency for expression typings. However, that work does not cover key features of object-oriented languages: Subtype polymorphism, nominal typing, and implementation inheritance. Type checkers encode these features in the form of class tables, an additional form of typing context inhibiting incrementaliza…
A key challenge when statically typing so-called dynamic languages is the ubiquity of value-based overloading, where a given function can dynamically reflect upon and behave according to the types of its arguments. Thus, to establish basic types, the analysis must reason precisely about values, but in the presence of higher-order functions and polymorphism, this reasoning itself can require basic types. In this paper we address this chicken-and-egg problem by introducing the framework of two-phased typing. The first "trust" phase performs classical, i.e. flow-, path- and value-insensitive type…
Concurrent and parallel programming is difficult due to the presence of memory side-effects, which may introduce data races. Type qualifiers, such as reference capabilities, can remove data races by restricting sharing of mutable data. Unfortunately, reference capability languages are an all-in or nothing game, i.e., all the types must be annotated with reference capabilities. In this work in progress, we propose to mix the ideas from the reference capability literature with gradual typing, leading to gradual reference capabilities.
Harnessing the power of dependently typed languages can be difficult. Programmers must manually construct proofs to produce well-typed programs, which is not an easy task. In particular, migrating code to these languages is challenging. Gradual typing can make dependently-typed languages easier to use by mixing static and dynamic checking in a principled way. With gradual types, programmers can incrementally migrate code to a dependently typed language. However, adding gradual types to dependent types creates a new challenge: mixing decidable type-checking and incremental migration in a full-f…
We introduce the Fusion algorithm for local refinement type inference, yielding a new SMT-based method for verifying programs with polymorphic data types and higher-order functions. Fusion is concise as the programmer need only write signatures for (externally exported) top-level functions and places with cyclic (recursive) dependencies, after which Fusion can predictably synthesize the most precise refinement types for all intermediate terms (expressible in the decidable refinement logic), thereby checking the program without false alarms. We have implemented Fusion and evaluated it on the be…
Contemporary proof assistants such as Coq require that recursive functions be terminating and corecursive functions be productive to maintain logical consistency of their type theories, and some ensure these properties using syntactic checks. However, being syntactic, they are inherently delicate and restrictive, preventing users from easily writing obviously terminating or productive functions at their whim. Meanwhile, there exist many sized type theories that perform type-based termination and productivity checking, including theories based on the Calculus of (Co)Inductive Constructions (CIC…
GADTs were introduced in Haskell's eco-system more than a decade ago, but their interaction with several mainstream features such as type classes and functional dependencies has a lot of room for improvement. More specifically, for some GADTs it can be surprisingly difficult to provide an instance for even the simplest of type classes. In this paper we identify the source of this shortcoming and address it by introducing a conservative extension to Haskell's type classes: Bidirectional Type Class Instances. In essence, under our interpretation class instances correspond to logical bi-implicati…
Many object-oriented dynamic languages allow programmers to _extract methods_ from objects and treat them as functions. This allows for flexible programming patterns, but presents challenges for type systems. In particular, a simple treatment of method extraction would require methods to be contravariant in the receiver type, making overriding all-but-impossible. We present a detailed investigation of this problem, as well as an implemented and evaluated solution. Method extraction is a feature of many dynamically-typed and gradually-typed languages, ranging from Python and PHP to Flow and Typ…
This work studies gradual typing for row types and row polymorphism. Key ingredients in this work are the dynamic row type, which represents a statically unknown part of a row, and consistency for row types, which allows injecting static row types into the dynamic row type and, conversely, projecting the dynamic row type to any static row type. While consistency captures the behavior of the dynamic row type statically, it makes the semantics of a gradually typed language incoherent when combined with row equivalence which identifies row types up to field reordering. To solve this problem, we d…
Error detection facilities for dynamic languages are often based on unit testing. Thus, the advantage of rapid prototyping and flexibility must be weighed against cumbersome and time consuming test suite development. Lindahl and Sagonas' success typings provide a means of static must-fail detection in Erlang. Due to the constraint-based nature of the approach, some errors involving nested tuples and recursion cannot be detected. We propose an approach that uses an extension of model checking for pattern-matching recursion schemes with context-aware ranked tree automata to provide improved succ…
We present a notion of bounded quantification for refinement types and show how it expands the expressiveness of refinement typing by using it to develop typed combinators for: (1) relational algebra and safe database access, (2) Floyd-Hoare logic within a state transformer monad equipped with combinators for branching and looping, and (3) using the above to implement a refined IO monad that tracks capabilities and resource usage. This leap in expressiveness comes via a translation to "ghost" functions, which lets us retain the automated and decidable SMT based checking and inference that make…
Graphs are a generalized concept that encompasses more complex data structures than trees, such as difference lists, doubly-linked lists, skip lists, and leaf-linked trees. Normally, these structures are handled with destructive assignments to heaps, which is opposed to a purely functional programming style and makes verification difficult. We propose a new purely functional language, $λ_{GT}$, that handles graphs as immutable, first-class data structures with a pattern matching mechanism based on Graph Transformation and developed a new type system, $F_{GT}$, for the language. Our approach is…
In this paper, we present an explicit substitution calculus which distinguishes between ordinary bound variables and meta-variables. Its typing discipline is derived from contextual modal type theory. We first present a dependently typed lambda calculus with explicit substitutions for ordinary variables and explicit meta-substitutions for meta-variables. We then present a weak head normalization procedure which performs both substitutions lazily and in a single pass thereby combining substitution walks for the two different classes of variables. Finally, we describe a bidirectional type checki…
Situation calculus has been widely applied in Artificial Intelligence related fields. This formalism is considered as a dialect of logic programming language and mostly used in dynamic domain modeling. However, type systems are hardly deployed in situation calculus in the literature. To achieve a correct and sound typed program written in situation calculus, adding typing elements into the current situation calculus will be quite helpful. In this paper, we propose to add more typing mechanisms to the current version of situation calculus, especially for three basic elements in situation calcul…
The Web of Linked Data is the cumulation of over a decade of work by the Web standards community in their effort to make data more Web-like. We provide an introduction to the Web of Linked Data from the perspective of a Web developer that would like to build an application using Linked Data. We identify a weakness in the development stack as being a lack of domain specific scripting languages for designing background processes that consume Linked Data. To address this weakness, we design a scripting language with a simple but appropriate type system. In our proposed architecture some data is c…
We present a calculus for processing semistructured data that spans differences of application area among several novel query languages, broadly categorized as "NoSQL". This calculus lets users define their own operators, capturing a wider range of data processing capabilities, whilst providing a typing precision so far typical only of primitive hard-coded operators. The type inference algorithm is based on semantic type checking, resulting in type information that is both precise, and flexible enough to handle structured and semistructured data. We illustrate the use of this calculus by encod…
Structure editors allow programmers to edit the tree structure of a program directly. This can have cognitive benefits, particularly for novice and end-user programmers. It also simplifies matters for tool designers, because they do not need to contend with malformed program text. This paper defines Hazelnut, a structure editor based on a small bidirectionally typed lambda calculus extended with holes and a cursor. Hazelnut goes one step beyond syntactic well-formedness: its edit actions operate over statically meaningful incomplete terms. Naively, this would force the programmer to construct …
Session types have emerged as a typing discipline for communication protocols. Existing calculi with session types come equipped with many different primitives that combine communication with the introduction or elimination of the transmitted value. We present a foundational session type calculus with a lightweight operational semantics. It fully decouples communication from the introduction and elimination of data and thus features a single communication reduction, which acts as a rendezvous between senders and receivers. We achieve this decoupling by introducing label-dependent session types…
Elixir is a functional programming language with dynamic typing. We propose a gradual type system that makes it possible to perform type-checking on a significant fragment of the language. An important feature of the type system is that it does not require any syntactic change to Elixir. Type information is provided by means of function signatures which are declared in terms of Elixir typespec directives. The proposed type system is based on subtyping and is backward compatible, as it allows the presence of untyped code fragments. We have implemented a prototype of the type-checker in Elixir i…
Intersection and union types denote conjunctions and disjunctions of properties. Using bidirectional typechecking, intersection types are relatively straightforward, but union types present challenges. For union types, we can case-analyze a subterm of union type when it appears in evaluation position (replacing the subterm with a variable, and checking that term twice under appropriate assumptions). This technique preserves soundness in a call-by-value semantics. Sadly, there are so many choices of subterms that a direct implementation is not practical. But carefully transforming programs into…
We describe an application of Prolog: a type checking tool for the Q functional language. Q is a terse vector processing language, a descendant of APL, which is getting more and more popular, especially in financial applications. Q is a dynamically typed language, much like Prolog. Extending Q with static typing improves both the readability of programs and programmer productivity, as type errors are discovered by the tool at compile time, rather than through debugging the program execution. The type checker uses constraints that are handled by Prolog Constraint Handling Rules. During the anal…
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
We present a programming model and typing discipline for complex multi-robot coordination programming. Our model encompasses both synchronisation through message passing and continuous-time dynamic motion primitives in physical space. We specify \emph{continuous-time motion primitives} in an assume-guarantee logic that ensures compatibility of motion primitives as well as collision freedom. We specify global behaviour of programs in a \emph{choreographic} type system that extends multiparty session types with jointly executed motion primitives, predicated refinements, as well as a \emph{separa…
