Seminars & Workshops

Type Checking with Open type Functions

Speaker:	Tom Schrijvers , Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
When:	2010-04-15 16:00
Place:	Room 309, Bldg 302, SNU

Abstract

We report on an extension of Haskell with open type-level functions and equality constraints that unifies earlier work on GADTs, functional dependencies, and associated types. The contribution of the paper is that we identify and characterise the key technical challenge of entailment checking; and we give a novel, decidable, sound, and complete algorithm to solve it, together with some practically-important variants. Our system is implemented in GHC, and is already in active use. This is joint work with Simon Peyton Jones, Manuel Chakravarty and Martin Sulzmann

Short bio

Tom Schrijvers is a senior postdoctoral researcher of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders affiliated to the Department of Computer Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He received his Ph.D. in June 2005 with a thesis on "Analyses, Optimizations and Extensions of Constraint Handling Rules". His general area of interest is programming languages, and he has made research contributions to Functional, Logic and Constraint Programming on various topics (type inference, program analysis, optimized compilation, refactoring, etc).