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International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming

FLOPS 2014: Functional and Logic Programming pp 119–135Cite as

Lightweight Higher-Kinded Polymorphism

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 8475)

Abstract

Higher-kinded polymorphism —i.e. abstraction over type constructors— is an essential component of many functional programming techniques such as monads, folds, and embedded DSLs. ML-family languages typically support a form of abstraction over type constructors using functors, but the separation between the core language and the module language leads to awkwardness as functors proliferate.

We show how to express higher-kinded polymorphism in OCaml without functors, using an abstract type app to represent type application, and opaque brands to denote abstractable type constructors. We demonstrate the flexibility of our approach by using it to translate a variety of standard higher-kinded programs into functor-free OCaml code.

Keywords

  • Type Expression
  • Type Constructor
  • Abstract Type
  • Core Language
  • Constructor Class

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-07151-0_8
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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cambridge, UK

    Jeremy Yallop & Leo White

Authors
  1. Jeremy Yallop
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  2. Leo White
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 653, 84105, Beer Sheva, Israel

    Michael Codish

  2. Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Aza-aoba 6-3-09, 980-8579, Sendai, Japan

    Eijiro Sumii

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Yallop, J., White, L. (2014). Lightweight Higher-Kinded Polymorphism. In: Codish, M., Sumii, E. (eds) Functional and Logic Programming. FLOPS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8475. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07151-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07151-0_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07150-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07151-0

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