Encoding types in ML-like languages

Abstract

This article presents several general approaches to programming with type-indexed families of values within a Hindley-Milner type system. A type-indexed family of values is a function that maps a family of types to a family of values. The function performs a case analysis on the input types and returns values of possibly different types. Such a case analysis on types seems to be prohibited by the Hindley-Milner type system. Our approaches solve the problem by using type encodings. The compile-time types of the type encodings reflect the types themselves, thereby making the approaches type-safe, in the sense that the underlying type system statically prevents any mismatch between the input type and the function arguments that depend on this type. A type encoding could be either value-dependent, meaning that the type encoding is tied to a specific type-indexed family, or value-independent, meaning that the type encoding can be shared by various type-indexed families. Our first approach is value-dependent: we simply interpret a type as its corresponding value. Our second approach provides value-independent type encodings through embedding and projection functions; they are universal type interpretations, in that they can be used to compute other type interpretations. We also present an alternative approach to value-independent type encodings, using higher-order functors. We demonstrate our techniques through applications such as C printf-like formatting, type-directed partial evaluation, and subtype coercions. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.