Finally tagless, partially evaluated: tagless staged interpreters for simpler typed languages

• Authors: Jacques Carette;Oleg Kiselyov;Chung-Chieh Shan
• Venue: APLAS'07 Proceedings of the 5th Asian conference on Programming languages and systems
• Year: 2007

We have built the first family of tagless interpretations for a higher-order typed object language in a typed metalanguage (Haskell or ML) that require no dependent types, generalized algebraic data types, or postprocessing to eliminate tags. The statically type-preserving interpretations include an evaluator, a compiler (or staged evaluator), a partial evaluator, and call-by-name and call-by-value CPS transformers. Our main idea is to encode HOAS using cogen functions rather than data constructors. In other words, we represent object terms not in an initial algebra but using the coalgebraic structure of the λ-calculus. Our representation also simulates inductive maps from types to types, which are required for typed partial evaluation and CPS transformations. Our encoding of an object term abstracts over the various ways to interpret it, yet statically assures that the interpreters never get stuck. To achieve self-interpretation and show Jones-optimality, we relate this exemplar of higher-rank and higher-kind polymorphism to plugging a term into a context of let-polymorphic bindings. It should also be possible to define languages with a highly refined syntactic type structure. Ideally, such a treatment should be metacircular, in the sense that the type structure used in the defined language should be adequate for the defining language.