Untangling Typechecking of Intersections and Unions

Intersection and union types denote conjunctions and disjunctions of properties. Using bidirectional typechecking, intersection types are relatively straightforward, but union types present challenges. For union types, we can case-analyze a subterm of union type when it appears in evaluation position (replacing the subterm with a variable, and checking that term twice under appropriate assumptions). This technique preserves soundness in a call-by-value semantics. Sadly, there are so many choices of subterms that a direct implementation is not practical. But carefully transforming programs into let-normal form drastically reduces the number of choices. The key results are soundness and completeness: a typing derivation (in the system with too many subterm choices) exists for a program if and only if a derivation exists for the let-normalized program.Comment: In Proceedings ITRS 2010, arXiv:1101.410

Bidirectional Type Checking for Relational Properties

Relational type systems have been designed for several applications including information flow, differential privacy, and cost analysis. In order to achieve the best results, these systems often use relational refinements and relational effects to maximally exploit the similarity in the structure of the two programs being compared. Relational type systems are appealing for relational properties because they deliver simpler and more precise verification than what could be derived from typing the two programs separately. However, relational type systems do not yet achieve the practical appeal of their non-relational counterpart, in part because of the lack of a general foundations for implementing them. In this paper, we take a step in this direction by developing bidirectional relational type checking for systems with relational refinements and effects. Our approach achieves the benefits of bidirectional type checking, in a relational setting. In particular, it significantly reduces the need for typing annotations through the combination of type checking and type inference. In order to highlight the foundational nature of our approach, we develop bidirectional versions of several relational type systems which incrementally combine many different components needed for expressive relational analysis.Comment: 14 page

Greedy Bidirectional Polymorphism

Bidirectional typechecking has become popular in advanced type systems because it works in many situations where inference is undecidable. In this paper, I show how to cleanly handle parametric polymorphism in a bidirectional setting. The key contribution is a bidirectional type system for a subset of ML that supports first-class (higher-rank and even impredicative) polymorphism, and is complete for predicative polymorphism (including ML-style polymorphism and higher-rank polymorphism). The system’s power comes from bidirectionality combined with a “greedy ” method of finding polymorphic instances inspired by Cardelli’s early work on System F<:. This work demonstrates that bidirectionality is a good foundation for traditionally vexing features like first-class polymorphism