[ACM Press the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN conference - San Diego, California, USA (2007.06.10-2007.06.13)] Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation - PLDI '07 - Searching for type-error messages

✍ Scribed by Lerner, Benjamin S.; Flower, Matthew; Grossman, Dan; Chambers, Craig

• Book ID: 121314242
• Publisher: ACM Press
• Year: 2007
• Weight: 398 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 1595936335
• DOI: 10.1145/1250734.1250783

✦ Synopsis

Advanced type systems often need some form of type inference to reduce the burden of explicit typing, but type inference often leads to poor error messages for ill-typed programs. This work pursues a new approach to constructing compilers and presenting typeerror messages in which the type-checker itself does not produce the messages. Instead, it is an oracle for a search procedure that finds similar programs that do type-check. Our two-fold goal is to improve error messages while simplifying compiler construction.Our primary implementation and evaluation is for Caml, a language with full type inference. We also present a prototype for C++ template functions, where type instantiation is implicit. A key extension is making our approach robust even when the program has multiple independent type errors.