Refinement Types for ML Tim Freeman Frank Pfenning
[email protected] [email protected] School of Computer Science School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213-3890 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213-3890 Abstract tended to the full Standard ML language. To see the opportunity to improve ML’s type system, We describe a refinement of ML’s type system allow- consider the following function which returns the last ing the specification of recursively defined subtypes of cons cell in a list: user-defined datatypes. The resulting system of refine- ment types preserves desirable properties of ML such as datatype α list = nil | cons of α * α list decidability of type inference, while at the same time fun lastcons (last as cons(hd,nil)) = last allowing more errors to be detected at compile-time. | lastcons (cons(hd,tl)) = lastcons tl The type system combines abstract interpretation with We know that this function will be undefined when ideas from the intersection type discipline, but remains called on an empty list, so we would like to obtain a closely tied to ML in that refinement types are given type error at compile-time when lastcons is called with only to programs which are already well-typed in ML. an argument of nil. Using refinement types this can be achieved, thus preventing runtime errors which could be 1 Introduction caught at compile-time. Similarly, we would like to be able to write code such as Standard ML [MTH90] is a practical programming lan- case lastcons y of guage with higher-order functions, polymorphic types, cons(x,nil) => print x and a well-developed module system.