Let should not be generalized

Authors:
Dimitrios Vytiniotis;Simon Peyton Jones;Tom Schrijvers
Affiliations:
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom;Microsoft Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom;Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Venue:
Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Types in language design and implementation
Year:
2010

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Abstract

From the dawn of time, all derivatives of the classic Hindley-Milner type system have supported implicit generalisation of local let-bindings. Yet, as we will show, for more sophisticated type systems implicit let-generalisation imposes a disproportionate complexity burden. Moreover, it turns out that the feature is very seldom used, so we propose to eliminate it. The payoff is a substantial simplification, both of the specification of the type system, and of its implementation.