Type inference in the presence of overloading, subtyping and recursive types

• Authors: Stefan Kaes
• Venue: LFP '92 Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming
• Year: 1992

We present a unified approach to type inference in the presence of overloading and coercions based on the concept of constrained types. We define a generic inference system, show that subtyping and overloading can be treated as a special instance of this system and develop a simple algorithm to compute principal types. We prove the decidability of type inference for the class of decomposable predicates and develop a canonical representation for principal types based on most accurate simplifications of constraint sets. Finally, we investigate the extension of our techniques to recursive types.