Conclusion and future work. Extracting Programs from Type Class Proofs – p.2 Type classes.pdfVIP

Extracting Programs from Type Class Proofs Martin Sulzmann National University of Singapore Extracting Programs from Type Class Proofs – p.1 Outline Background: Type class examples. The topic: Translating type classes. The problem: Extracting programs from type class proofs. The results. Concise formulation of Haskell-style type class proof systems: Type improvement. Recursive dictionaries. Dictionary construction algorithm. Conclusion and future work. Extracting Programs from Type Class Proofs – p.2 Type classes Systematic concept to support ad-hoc polymorphism in Hindley/Milner. Invented by Wadler/Blott [WB89] and Kaes [Kae88]. Type class translation problem studied in [HHPW96, Fax02, PJ93, Aug93]. Found in a number of languages such as Haskell [Pey03], Mercury [Hen01, JHS00] , HAL [DGH+99] and Clean [PvE98]. Many useful applications: programming in the large (type classes vs modules), generic programming etc Extracting Programs from Type Class Proofs – p.3 The “classic” Eq type class class Eq a where (==)::a-a-Bool instance Eq Int where (==) = primIntEq instance Eq a = Eq [a] where (==) [] [] = True (==) (x:xs) (y:ys) = (x==y) (xs==ys) (==) _ _ = False Eq a states that type a is a member of type class Eq. We refer to Eq a as a type class constraint. == is an ad-hoc polymorphic function (a.k.a. overloaded method) which can provide separate definition for each data type. Instances provide specific definitions. Program text [1] == [1,2]demands an instance Eq [Int]. Program text xs == [y] demands an instance Eq a wher