Type Reconstruction for Type Classes
Tobias Nipkow, Christian Prehofer
We study the type inference problem for a system with type classes as in the
functional programming language Haskell. Type classes are an extension of
ML-style polymorphism with overloading. We generalize Milner's work on
polymorphism by introducing a separate context constraining the type
variables in a typing judgement. This leads to simple type inference systems
and algorithms which closely resemble those for ML. In particular we present
a new unification algorithm which is an extension of syntactic unification
with constraint solving. The existence of principal types follows from an
analysis of this unification algorithm.
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BibTeX:
<![CDATA[
@article{Nipkow-Prehofer-JFP95,
author={Tobias Nipkow and Christian Prehofer},
title={Type Reconstruction for Type Classes},
journal={Journal of Functional Programming},volume=5,number=2,
year=1995,pages={201--224}}
]]></plaintext></p></div></div>