Erasure and polymorphism in pure type systems

Abstract

We introduce Erasure Pure Type Systems, an extension to Pure Type Systems with an erasure semantics centered around a type constructor ∀ indicating parametric polymorphism. The erasure phase is guided by lightweight program annotations. The typing rules guarantee that well-typed programs obey a phase distinction between erasable (compile-time) and non-erasable (run-time) terms. The erasability of an expression depends only on how its value is used in the rest of the program. Despite this simple observation, most languages treat erasability as an intrinsic property of expressions, leading to code duplication problems. Our approach overcomes this deficiency by treating erasability extrinsically. Because the execution model of EPTS generalizes the familiar notions of type erasure and parametric polymorphism, we believe functional programmers will find it quite natural to program in such a setting. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.