Practical Variable-Arity Polymorphism

Authors:
T. Stephen Strickland;Sam Tobin-Hochstadt;Matthias Felleisen
Affiliations:
PLT @ Northeastern University,;PLT @ Northeastern University,;PLT @ Northeastern University,
Venue:
ESOP '09 Proceedings of the 18th European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems: Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2009
Year:
2009

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Abstract

Just as some functions have uniform behavior over distinct types, other functions have uniform behavior over distinct arities. These variable-arity functions are widely used in scripting languages such as Scheme and Python. Statically typed languages also accommodate modest forms of variable-arity functions, but even ML and Haskell, languages with highly expressive type systems, cannot type check the wide variety of variable-arity functions found in untyped functional languages. Consequently, their standard libraries contain numerous copies of the same function definition with slightly different names. As part of the Typed Scheme project--an on-going effort to create an explicitly typed sister language for PLT Scheme--we have designed and implemented an expressive type system for variable-arity functions. Our practical validation in the context of our extensive code base confirms the usefulness of the enriched type system.