Typer a de la classe : le polymorphisme ad hoc dans un langage avec des types dépendants et de la métaprogrammation

La modularité est un enjeu important en programmation, surtout quand on l’enrichit avec des preuves, comme dans les langages avec des types dépendants. Typer est un tel langage, et afin d’augmenter sa modularité et de lui ajouter un moyen de faire la surcharge d’opérateurs, on s’inspire d’Agda et Coq et on l’étend avec les arguments instances, qui généralisent les classes de types de Haskell. Un aspect qui distingue notre conception est que comme Typer généralise les définitions, la généralisation des contraintes de classe est grandement facilitée. Pour pouvoir faire les preuves de lois de classes, on doit également ajouter l’élimination dépendante des types inductifs au langage, dont certains aspects sont en retour facilités par les arguments instances. Sur la base de ces deux fonctionnalités, on offre également une solution au problème de la cécité booléenne, tel que décrit par Harper.Modularity is an important concern for software development, especially when the latter is enriched with proofs in a language with dependent types. Typer is such a language, and in order to increase its modularity, and also provide a way to overload operators, we take inspiration from Agda and Coq and extend it with instance arguments, a generalization of Haskell’s type classes. An aspect that sets our design apart is that since Typer generalizes definitions, it greatly simplifies the generalization of class constraints. In order to allow writing proofs for class laws, we must also implement the dependent elimination of inductive types. In return, instance arguments facilitate some details of dependent elimination. Using both features, we suggest a solution to the problem of Boolean Blindness

Coherent Explicit Dictionary Application for Haskell

Type classes are one of Haskell's most popular features and extend its type system with ad-hoc polymorphism. Since their conception, there were useful features that could not be offered because of the desire to offer two correctness properties: coherence and global uniqueness of instances. Coherence essentially guarantees that program semantics are independent from type-checker internals. Global uniqueness of instances is relied upon by libraries for enforcing, for example, that a single order relation is used for all manipulations of an ordered binary tree. The features that could not be offered include explicit dictionary application and local instances, which would be highly useful in practice. In this paper, we propose a new design for offering explicit dictionary application, without compromising coherence and global uniqueness. We introduce a novel criterion based on GHC's type argument roles to decide when a dictionary application is safe with respect to global uniqueness of instances. We preserve coherence by detecting potential sources of incoherence, and prove it formally. Moreover, our solution makes it possible to use local dictionaries. In addition to developing our ideas formally, we have implemented a working prototype in GHC.status: Published onlin