CLEAN: A language for functional graph rewriting
Proc. of a conference on Functional programming languages and computer architecture
The revised report on the syntactic theories of sequential control and state
Theoretical Computer Science
The DrScheme project: an overview
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
An axiomatic basis for computer programming
Communications of the ACM
An indexed model of recursive types for foundational proof-carrying code
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
The Definition of Standard ML
A Discipline of Programming
Contracts for higher-order functions
Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
TACS '97 Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Software
DrScheme: a programming environment for Scheme
Journal of Functional Programming
Sound and complete models of contracts
Journal of Functional Programming
Typed contracts for functional programming
FLOPS'06 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Functional and Logic Programming
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Even in statically typed languages it is useful to have certain invariants checked dynamically. Findler and Felleisen gave an algorithm for dynamically checking expressive higher-order types called contracts. If we postulate soundness (in the sense that whenever a term is accused of violating its contract it really does fail to satisfy it), then their algorithm implies a semantics for contracts. Unfortunately, the implicit nature of the resulting model makes it rather unwieldy.In this paper we demonstrate that a direct approach yields essentially the same semantics without having to refer to contract-checking in its definition. The so-defined model largely coincides with intuition, but it does expose some peculiarities in its interpretation of predicate contracts where a notion of safety (which we define in the paper) "leaks" into the semantics of Findler and Felleisen's original unrestricted predicate contracts.This counter-intuitive aspect of the semantics can be avoided by changing the language, replacing unrestricted predicate contracts with a restricted version. The corresponding loss in expressive power can be recovered by also providing a way of explicitly expressing safety as a contract-either in ad-hoc fashion or, e.g., by including general recursive contracts.