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Towards Type Inference for JavaScript

  • Conference paper
ECOOP 2005 - Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 3586))

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Abstract

Object-oriented scripting languages like Javascript and Python are popular partly because of their dynamic features. These include the runtime modification of objects and classes through addition of fields or updating of methods. These features make static typing difficult and so usually dynamic typing is used. Consequently, errors such as access to non-existent members are not detected until runtime.

We first develop a formalism for an object based language, JS0 with features from Javascript, including dynamic addition of fields and updating of methods. We give an operational semantics and static type system for JS0using structural types. Our types allow objects to evolve in a controlled manner by classifying members as definite or potential.

We define a type inference algorithm for JS0 that is sound with respect to the type system. If the type inference algorithm succeeds, then the program is typeable. Therefore, programmers can benefit from the safety offered by the type system, without the need to write explicitly types in their programs.

Work partly supported by EU within the FET – Global Computing initiative, project DART IST-2001-33477,MURST Cofin’02 project McTati, and MIUR Prin’04 project EOS.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Imperial College London, 180 Queen’s Gate, London, SW7 2BZ, U.K

    Christopher Anderson & Sophia Drossopoulou

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Via Bellini 25/G, Alessandria, Italy

    Paola Giannini

Authors
  1. Christopher Anderson
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  2. Paola Giannini
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  3. Sophia Drossopoulou
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Portland State University,  

    Andrew P. Black

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Anderson, C., Giannini, P., Drossopoulou, S. (2005). Towards Type Inference for JavaScript. In: Black, A.P. (eds) ECOOP 2005 - Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3586. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11531142_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11531142_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-27992-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31725-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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