Linear and substructural types are powerful tools, but adding them to
standard functional programming languages often means introducing extra
annotations and typing machinery. We propose a lightweight substructural type
system design that recasts the structural rules of weakening and contraction as
type classes; we demonstrate this design in a prototype language, Clamp.
Clamp supports polymorphic substructural types as well as an expressive
system of mutable references. At the same time, it adds little additional
overhead to a standard Damas-Hindley-Milner type system enriched with type
classes. We have established type safety for the core model and implemented a
type checker with type inference in Haskell.Comment: In Proceedings LINEARITY 2014, arXiv:1502.0441