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From: brm@neon.Stanford.EDU (Brian R. Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Dynamic typing (part 3)
Keywords: static dynamic type inference fl scheme
Message-ID: <1991Mar17.231736.23354@neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 17 Mar 91 23:17:36 GMT
References: <602@optima.cs.arizona.edu> <2400034@otter.hpl.hp.com> <1991Mar17.161210.5574@cc.helsinki.fi>
Sender: brm@cs.stanford.edu
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Ca , USA
Lines: 27

In article <1991Mar17.161210.5574@cc.helsinki.fi> jpiitulainen@cc.helsinki.fi writes:
>In article <2400034@otter.hpl.hp.com>, sfk@otter.hpl.hp.com (Steve Knight)
>writes:
>> One of the under-explored regions of this topic is that of heuristic type-
>> checking for dynamically typed languages.  My belief is that this hybrid
>> approach can be made effective enough to be useful.  I know the Scheme folks
>> have made progress in this area but I've not kept up to date on it.
>
>You might be interested in the following paper:
>  Olin Shivers, "Data-Flow Analysis and Type Recovery in Scheme",
>  March 30, 1990, CMU-CS-90-115, to appear in Peter Lee (ed.),
>  _Topics in Advanced Language Implementation_, MIT Press

You might also be interested in:
  A. Aiken and B. Murphy, "Static Type Inference in a Dynamically Typed
  Language", in {\em Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual ACM Symposium
  on the Principles of Programming Languages}, Orlando, 1991, pp. 279-290.

While this is specifically about type inference for the functional
language FL (successor of FP), it's also easily applicable to a
functional subset of Lisp, and, with a bit more effort, to a
non-functional subset (I think---haven't actually done it).  It hinges
a lot on our representation of types, to be described in an upcoming
paper (also described somewhat less completely & intelligibly in my
1990 MIT MS thesis, "A Type Inference System for FL").

					-Brian