Polymorphic Delimited Continuations

We propose a type system for lock-freedom in the π-calculus, which guarantees that certain communications will eventually succeed. Distinguishing features of our type system are: it can verify lock-freedom of concurrent programs that have sophisticated recursive communication structures; it can be fully automated; it is hybrid, in that it combines a type system for lock-freedom with local reasoning about deadlock-freedom, termination, and confluence analyses. Moreover, the type system is parameterized by deadlock-freedom/termination/confluence analyses, so that any methods (e.g. type systems and model checking) can be used for those analyses. A lock-freedom analysis tool has been implemented based on the proposed type system, and tested for nontrivial programs.

With the increase in system complexity, designers are increasingly using IP blocks as a means for filling the designer productivity gap. This has given rise to system level languages which connect IP blocks together. However, these languages have in general not been subject to formalisation. They are considered too trivial to justify the formalisation effort. Unfortunately, the lack of formality in these languages can give rise to errors that are not caught until late in the design cycle. We present a type system for static typing of such a system level language. We argue that the proposed type system will eliminate an important class of errors currently permitted by existing system level languages. A comparison is made against existing tools and we show that the type checker detects errors earlier in the design flow. This reduces synthesis iterations and decreases the time to market

The distinction of the semantic spaces of elements and types is common practice in practically all type systems. A few type systems, including some early ones, have been proposed whose semantic space has functions only, i.e., depending on the context functions may play element roles as well as type roles. All of these systems are either lacking expressive power, in particular, polymorphism, or they violate uniqueness of types. This work presents for the first time a function-based type system in which typing is a relation between functions and which is using an ordering of functions to introduce bounded polymorphism. The ordering is based on an infinite set of top objects, itself strictly linearly ordered, each of which characterizes a certain function space. These top objects are predicative in the sense that a function using some top object cannot be smaller than this object. The interpretation of proposition as types and elements as proofs remains valid and is extended by viewing the ordering between types as logical implication. The proposed system can be shown to satisfy confluence and subject reduction. Furthermore one can show that the ordering is a partial order, every set of expressions has a maximal element, and there is a (unique) minimal, logically strongest, type among all types of an element. The latter result implies an alternative notion of uniqueness of types. Strong normalisation is the deepest property and its proof is based on a well-founded relation defined over a subsystem of expressions without eliminators. Semantic abstraction of the objects involved in typing, i.e., to use functions in element as well as type roles in a relational setting, is the major contribution of function-based type systems. This work shows that dependent products are not necessary for defining type systems with bounded polymorphism, rather it presents a consistent system with bounded polymorphism and minimal types where typing is a relation between partially ordered functions.

In this chapter, the authors apply type-theoretic techniques to the service description and composition verification. A flexible type system is introduced for modeling instances and mappings of semi-structured data, and is demonstrated to be effective in modeling a wide range of data services, ranging from relational database queries to web services for XML. Type-theoretic analysis and verification are then reduced to the problem of type unification. Some (in)tractability results of the unification problem and the expressiveness of their proposed type system are presented in this chapter. Finally, the auhtors construct a complete unification algorithm which runs in EXP-TIME in the worst case, but runs in polynomial time for a large family of unification problems rising from practical type analysis of service compositions.

This thesis proposes a novel way of performing type checking, whose results are incremental, depending on the provided local information. This new way of type checking is called co-contextual, where all context information of expressions, methods, classes, etc., is removed. Instead, we introduce corresponding structures using requirements. Standard type systems are translated to the co-contextual ones systematically using dualism as technique. Type systems play an important role to prevent execution errors from occurring during runtime. They are used to check programs statically for potential errors. Programs are type checked against a given set of rules. Depending on these rules programs are well-typed or not. The set of these rules is called typing rules. Each type rule associates types to the constructs of a program given a certain context. There can be different forms of contexts, depending on the features of the typed programming language. Functional languages use a typing context of variables and their types; object-oriented (OO) languages use additional class tables. Class tables are used for example to ensure that method and class declarations are well-typed. Type checking is performed top-down. While traversing the syntax tree of a program, typing contexts are extended with information on the expressions and their types. In case of OO, class tables are extended with clauses from class declarations, including the class members, i.e., fields, methods, or constructors. Contexts are passed through the nodes of the syntax tree in order to coordinate type checking between them. Therefore, while traversing the syntax tree top-down, the type checker creates dependencies between otherwise independent subexpressions. This way, it inhibits incrementalization and parallelization of type checking. That is, a change to a node of the syntax tree would require to redo the type check of the whole syntax tree. In this thesis a novel formulation of type systems is proposed, in order to remove dependencies between subexpressions. We propose a co-contextual formulation of typing rules that depends only on the local program constructs, e.g., expressions, methods, classes. The co-contextual typing rules have as conclusion a type and sets of requirements. That is, contexts and class tables are replaced by the dual concept of context and class table requirements. In addition, operations on contexts and class tables are replaced by new dual operations on requirements. The co-contextual type checker traverses a syntax tree bottom-up and merges context requirements of independently checked subexpressions. We describe a method for systematically constructing a co-contextual formulation of type rules from a regular context-based formulation and we show how co-contextual type rules give rise to incremental type checking. We derive co-contextual type checkers for functional and OO languages. As a representative of functional languages we consider PCF and extensions of it: records, parametric polymorphism, structural subtyping and let-polymorphism. Also, we investigate featherweight java (FJ) as the basis of OO languages and extensions of it: method overloading and generics. We build a1 co-contextual type checker for FJ enabling key features of OO languages: subtype polymorphism, nominal typing and implementation inheritance. The dualism between the co-contextual and contextual type systems preserves the correctness of the contextual calculus. That is, we prove the correctness of the co-contextual calculus via the equivalence between contextual type rules and their co-contextual formulations. We implemented an incremental type checker for PCF along with a performance evaluation showing that co-contextual type checking has performance comparable to standard context-based type checking, and incrementalization can improve performance significantly. Regarding FJ, we implemented a co-contextual type checker with incrementalization and compared its performance against javac on a number of realistic programs. Our performance evaluation shows significant speedups for the co-contextual type checker with incrementalization in comparison to javac.

For many compiled languages, source-level types are erased very early in the compilation process. As a result, further compiler passes may convert type-safe source into type-unsafe machine code. Type-unsafe idioms in the original source and type-unsafe optimizations mean that type information in a stripped binary is essentially nonexistent. The problem of recovering high-level types by performing type inference over stripped machine code is called type reconstruction, and offers a useful capability in support of reverse engineering and decompilation. In this paper, we motivate and develop a novel type system and algorithm for machine-code type inference. The features of this type system were developed by surveying a wide collection of common source- and machine-code idioms, building a catalog of challenging cases for type reconstruction. We found that these idioms place a sophisticated set of requirements on the type system, inducing features such as recursively-constrained polymorphic types. Many of the features we identify are often seen only in expressive and powerful type systems used by high-level functional languages. Using these type-system features as a guideline, we have developed Retypd: a novel static type-inference algorithm for machine code that supports recursive types, polymorphism, and subtyping. Retypd yields more accurate inferred types than existing algorithms, while also enabling new capabilities such as reconstruction of pointer const annotations with 98% recall. Retypd can operate on weaker program representations than the current state of the art, removing the need for high-quality points-to information that may be impractical to compute.

For many compiled languages, source-level types are erased very early in the compilation process. As a result, further compiler passes may convert type-safe source into type-unsafe machine code. Type-unsafe idioms in the original source and type-unsafe optimizations mean that type information in a stripped binary is essentially nonexistent. The problem of recovering high-level types by performing type inference over stripped machine code is called type reconstruction, and offers a useful capability in support of reverse engineering and decompilation. In this paper, we motivate and develop a novel type system and algorithm for machine-code type inference. The features of this type system were developed by surveying a wide collection of common source- and machine-code idioms, building a catalog of challenging cases for type reconstruction. We found that these idioms place a sophisticated set of requirements on the type system, inducing features such as recursively-constrained polymorphic types. Many of the features we identify are often seen only in expressive and powerful type systems used by high-level functional languages. Using these type-system features as a guideline, we have developed Retypd: a novel static type-inference algorithm for machine code that supports recursive types, polymorphism, and subtyping. Retypd yields more accurate inferred types than existing algorithms, while also enabling new capabilities such as reconstruction of pointer const annotations with 98% recall. Retypd can operate on weaker program representations than the current state of the art, removing the need for high-quality points-to information that may be impractical to compute.

A common approach to improve software quality is to use programming guidelines to avoid common kinds of errors. In this paper, we consider the problem of enforcing guidelines for Featherweight Java (FJ). We formalize guidelines as sets of finite or infinite execution traces and develop a region-based type and effect system for FJ that can enforce such guidelines. We build on the work by Erbatur, Hofmann and Z\u{a}linescu, who presented a type system for verifying the finite event traces of terminating FJ programs. We refine this type system, separating region typing from FJ typing, and use ideas of Hofmann and Chen to extend it to capture also infinite traces produced by non-terminating programs. Our type and effect system can express properties of both finite and infinite traces and can compute information about the possible infinite traces of FJ programs. Specifically, the set of infinite traces of a method is constructed as the greatest fixed point of the operator which calculates the possible traces of method bodies. Our type inference algorithm is realized by working with the finitary abstraction of the system based on B\"uchi automata.

Consistent subtyping is employed in some gradual type systems to validate type conversions. The original definition by Siek and Taha serves as a guideline for designing gradual type systems with subtyping. Polymorphic types à la System F also induce a subtyping relation that relates polymorphic types to their instantiations. However, Siek and Taha’s definition is not adequate for polymorphic subtyping. The first goal of this article is to propose a generalization of consistent subtyping that is adequate for polymorphic subtyping and subsumes the original definition by Siek and Taha. The new definition of consistent subtyping provides novel insights with respect to previous polymorphic gradual type systems, which did not employ consistent subtyping. The second goal of this article is to present a gradually typed calculus for implicit (higher-rank) polymorphism that uses our new notion of consistent subtyping. We develop both declarative and (bidirectional) algorithmic versions for the type system. The algorithmic version employs techniques developed by Dunfield and Krishnaswami for higher-rank polymorphism to deal with instantiation. We prove that the new calculus satisfies all static aspects of the refined criteria for gradual typing. We also study an extension of the type system with static and gradual type parameters, in an attempt to support a variant of the dynamic criterion for gradual typing. Assuming a coherence conjecture for the extended calculus, we show that the dynamic gradual guarantee of our source language can be reduced to that of λ B, which, at the time of writing, is still an open question. Most of the metatheory of this article, except some manual proofs for the algorithmic type system and extensions, has been mechanically formalized using the Coq proof assistant.

This paper presents a flexible type system developed for an axiomatic specification language. The type system can be dynamically adapted to different application areas. In particular, it allows the modelling of different kinds of polymorphism, like type classes or subtyping. The type system is based on the concept of qualified types. It allows one to abstract from concrete types by using type variables and to qualify these type variables by type predicates. The properties of the type predicates are described by a specification language based on Horn clauses. The notion of well-typedness is defined via a type inference calculus. We investigate the implementation of the type inference calculus and present an inference algorithm which splits into two phases. The first phase checks the well-formedness of the given term and computes the necessary type predicate restrictions, The second phase uses resolution to prove the computed restrictions to be correct with respect to the type predicate specification. We show that the inference algorithm is correct and complete with respect to the type inference calculus.

We investigate finite-rank intersection type systems, analyzing the complexity of their type inference problems and their relation to the problem of recognizing semantically equivalent terms. Intersection types allow something of type τ 1 Λ τ 2 to be used in some places at type τ 1 and in other places at type τ 2 . A finite-rank intersection type system bounds how deeply the Λ can appear in type expressions. Such type systems enjoy strong normalization, subject reduction, and computable type inference, and they support a pragmatics for implementing parametric polymorphism. As a consequence, they provide a conceptually simple and tractable alternative to the impredicative polymorphism of System F and its extensions, while typing many more programs than the Hindley-Milner type system found in ML and Haskell.While type inference is computable at every rank, we show that its complexity grows exponentially as rank increases. Let K (0, n ) = n and K ( t + 1, n ) = 2 K ( t,n ) ; we prove that recognizing the pure λ-terms of size n that are typable at rank k is complete for DTIME [ K ( k −1, n )]. We then consider the problem of deciding whether two λ-terms typable at rank k have the same normal form, generalizing a well-known result of Statman from simple types to finite-rank intersection types. We show that the equivalence problem is DTIME [ K ( K ( k − 1, n ), 2)]-complete. This relationship between the complexity of typability and expressiveness is identical in wellknown decidable type systems such as simple types and Hindley-Milner types, but seems to fail for System F and its generalizations. The correspondence gives rise to a conjecture that if Τ is a predicative type system where typability has complexity t ( n ) and expressiveness has complexity e ( n ), then t ( n ) = Ω(log* e ( n )).

From a software engineering point of view, logic programming lacks many properties allowing secure development of large programs by many programmers. In this paper we try to improve these properties by proposing a polymorphic type system for Prolog. Our type system is able to deal with subtype relations if information about dataflow within clauses is available. This information can be given by a mode system. We give an outline of a type checking algorithm for this type system and discuss several problems which do not arise in type systems without subtypes.

The [lambda]-calculus provides a simple, well-established framework for research in functional programming languages that readily lends itself to the use offormal methods--that is, the use of mathematically sound techniques and supporting tools--to describe and verify properties of programming languages, as well. This is no coincidence. After all, the [lambda]-calculus formalizes the concept of effective computability, for all computable functions are definable in the untyped [lambda]-calculus, making it expressively equivalent torecursive functions. In software, the expressiveness of functional languages is considereda strength. Functional approaches to language design, however, needn't be limited to soft-ware. In hardware, the expressiveness of functional languages becomes a major obstacle to successful hardware synthesis, for the reason that such languages are usually capable of expressing general recursion. The presence of general recursion makes it possible to generate expressions that run forever, never producing a well-defined value. In this dissertation, we study two novel variants of the simply typed [lambda]-calculus, representing fragments of functional hardware description languages. The first variant extends the type system, using natural numbers representing time. This addition, though simple, is non-trivial. We prove that this calculus possesses bounded variants of type-safety and strong normalization. That is to say, we show that all well-typed expressions evaluate to values within a bound determined by the natural number index of their corresponding types. The second variant is a computational [lambda]-calculus that formalizes the core fragment of the hardware description language known as ReWire. We prove that the language has type-safety and is strongly normalizing -- the proof of strong normalizationis the first mechanized proof of its kind. We define an equational theory with respect to this language. This allows us to prove that the language has desirable security properties by construction. This work supports a full-edged, formal methodology for producing high assurance hardware.

This article presents a polymorphic modal type system and its principal type inference algorithm that conservatively extend ML by all of Lisp's staging constructs (the quasi-quotation system). The combination is meaningful because ML is a practical higher-order, impure, and typed language, while Lisp's quasi-quotation system has long evolved complying with the demands from multi-staged programming practices. Our type system supports open code, unrestricted operations on references, intentional variable-capturing substitution as well as capture-avoiding substitution, and lifting values into code, whose combination escaped all the previous systems.

This article presents a polymorphic modal type system and its principal type inference algorithm that conservatively extend ML by all of Lisp's staging constructs (the quasi-quotation system). The combination is meaningful because ML is a practical higher-order, impure, and typed language, while Lisp's quasi-quotation system has long evolved complying with the demands from multi-staged programming practices. Our type system supports open code, unrestricted operations on references, intentional variable-capturing substitution as well as capture-avoiding substitution, and lifting values into code, whose combination escaped all the previous systems.