Abstract
General refinement types allow types to be refined by predicates written in a general-purpose programming language, and can express function pre- and postconditions and data structure invariants. In this setting, with expressive and possibly verbose types, type reconstruction is particularly valuable, yet typeability is undecidable because it subsumes type checking. Using a generalized notion of type reconstruction, we present the first type reconstruction algorithm for a type system with base types refined by abitrary program terms. Our algorithm is a typeability-preserving transformation and defers type checking to a subsequent phase. The algorithm generates and solves a collection of implication constraints over refinement predicates, inferring maximally precise refinement predicates in a largely syntactic manner that is reminiscent of strongest postcondition calculation. Perhaps surprisingly, our notion of type reconstruction is decidable even though type checking is not.
Keywords
- Functional Programming
- Type Inference
- Type Check
- Shape Reconstruction
- Type Replacement
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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Knowles, K., Flanagan, C. (2007). Type Reconstruction for General Refinement Types. In: De Nicola, R. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. ESOP 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4421. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71316-6_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71316-6_34
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