On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 11:37 PM, Scott McLoughlin <scottmc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What is the relationship, positive and negative, between static
> typing in language design and user-transparent and modifiable
> systems bootstrapped from small kernels?
"Small type systems" aren't very powerful, and tend to grate on their
users. So people dream of more powerful type systems, to let them
write more flexible code. Soon you're in Hindley-Milner territory or
fighting the halting theorem and your system isn't so small and
understandable any more.
The solution seems to be a "pluggable types" system, which lets you
build a complicated and/or domain-specific static type system (or
several of them) from a small kernel (or a purely dynamic system).
AFAIK, this hasn't gotten a lot of attention from the research
community, partly because no one seems quite certain how to go about
building such a thing. Gilad Bracha seems to have done the most
thinking about it; see his position paper linked from:
http://bracha.org/Site/Newspeak.html
The bibliography of his position paper cites a number of other related papers.
I spend some time around 2007 trying to figure out how to write Java
1.5's type system in terms of a smaller kernel type system. I didn't
get very far. (I made much more progress on the syntactic evolution
of Java 1.5 from Java 1.0.) There are links between type systems and
abstract interpretation (see http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2208
); that may hold the key.
Perhaps some others of the list can fill in more details.
--scott
--
( http://cscott.net )
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