One of the most attractive features of untyped languages is the flexibility
in term creation and manipulation. However, with such power comes the
responsibility of ensuring the correctness of these operations. A solution is
adding run-time checks to the program via assertions, but this can introduce
overheads that are in many cases impractical. While static analysis can greatly
reduce such overheads, the gains depend strongly on the quality of the
information inferred. Reusable libraries, i.e., library modules that are
pre-compiled independently of the client, pose special challenges in this
context. We propose a technique which takes advantage of module systems which
can hide a selected set of functor symbols to significantly enrich the shape
information that can be inferred for reusable libraries, as well as an improved
run-time checking approach that leverages the proposed mechanisms to achieve
large reductions in overhead, closer to those of static languages, even in the
reusable-library context. While the approach is general and system-independent,
we present it for concreteness in the context of the Ciao assertion language
and combined static/dynamic checking framework. Our method maintains the full
expressiveness of the assertion language in this context. In contrast to other
approaches it does not introduce the need to switch the language to a (static)
type system, which is known to change the semantics in languages like Prolog.
We also study the approach experimentally and evaluate the overhead reduction
achieved in the run-time checks.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables; an extension of the paper version
accepted to PADL'18 (includes proofs, extra figures and examples omitted due
to space reasons
