Re: [Caml-list] "high end" type theory for working programmers?

["Krishnaswami, Neel" <neelk@cswcasa.com>]

Michael Vanier [mailto:mvanier@cs.caltech.edu] wrote:
> 
> I highly recommend Benjamin Pierce's new book "Types in Programming
> Languages" from MIT press.  It's very well-written, covers much of the
> material you describe, and includes implementations in ocaml ;-)

Let me second this recommendation. It's a great book. I'm a regular
programmer and I found it extremely useful. 

I think that Olivier Danvy's "Functional Unparsing" paper is one
of the best illustrations of why this stuff is useful for regular
programming. There's nothing more practical in the world than 
printing text, and here he uses continuation-passing style, combinators,
higher-order functions, and all that stuff to derive a blisteringly
fast statically-typed printf. It's amazing. (And you can make the
library nearly perfect to use if you use labels and optional arguments.)

This technique is apparently an instance of a more general technique
that Zhe Yang describes in his paper "Encoding Types in ML-like
Languages", at <http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/53925.html>.

--
Neel Krishnaswami
neelk@cswcasa.com
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