Type Checking for JavaScript

Authors:
Christopher Anderson;Paola Giannini
Affiliations:
Department of Computing, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, 180 Queen's Gate, London SW7 2BZ, U.K.;Dipartimento di Informatica, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Spalto Marengo 33, Alessandria, Italy
Venue:
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
Year:
2005

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Abstract

JavaScript is a powerful imperative object based language made popular by its use in web pages. It supports flexible program development by allowing dynamic addition of members to objects. Code is dynamically typed: a runtime access to a non-existing member causes an error. We suggest a static type system for JavaScript that will detect such type errors. Therefore, programmers can benefit from the flexible programming style offered by JavaScript and from the safety offered by a static type system. We demonstrate our type system with a formalism of JavaScript, JS"0. Our types are structural. Members of an object type are classified into definite and potential. A potential member becomes definite upon assignment. We outline a proof that our type system is sound.