Type checking in an imperfect world

Miller, Terrence C.

doi:10.1145/567752.567775

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…A forward inference makes predictions which are guaranteed to be correct, whereas backwardinferences only provide information which is required to be correct for the program to succeed at run-time. This distinction can be used to warn the programmer about type inconsistencies or to automatically generate minimal run-time time checks which guarantee the safety of the code [5]. We have currently focused primarily on forward inference rules.…”

Section: The Type Inference Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Preliminary report on a practical type inference system for common Lisp

Beer

1987

SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers

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While the combination of dynamic typing and generic functions in Lisp have always presented a challenge to optimizing Lisp compilers for stock hardware, the situation has never been more difficult than in Common Lisp [7]. For example, one may add any of eight distinct primitive types of numbers in any combination using the single function+. While the overhead of sorting this type information out at run-time may be largely alleviated by the use of special-purpose hardware or microcode, the problem remains critical for implementations running on conventional general-purpose computers. Indeed, this situation played a crucial role in at least one wide-ranging critique of Common Lisp [2].

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Section: The Type Inference Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The imperative approach [4], [5], on the other hand, represents a program as a flowgraph whose nodes are assignment statements of the form Z ~ ~(XpX2,...,Xk). The types of all variables in a program are determined by repeatedly performing forward and backward inferences across these statements until fixed points are achieved.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preliminary report on a practical type inference system for common Lisp

Beer

1987

SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers

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“…Jones and Muchnick (31) also developed a general scheme for type determination, though their work was directed toward the language TEMPO. Miller (35) applied the work of Kaplan and Ullman to type checking. Type determination for the SETL language was studied by Tenenbaum (52,53) and Sharir (47).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Type determination in an optimizing compiler for APL

Roeder

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TICL—A type inference system for Common Lisp

Kessler

1990

Softw Pract Exp

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Most current Common Lisp compilers generate more efficient code when supplied with data type information. However, in keeping with standard Lisp programming style, most programmers are reluctant to provide type information; they simply allow the run-time type system to manage the data types accordingly. To fill this gap, we have designed and implemented a type inference system €or Common Lisp (TICL). TICL takes a Lisp program that has been annotated with a few type declarations, adds as many declarations as possible, and produces a type declared program. The compiler can then use this information to generate more efficient code. Measurements indicate that a 20 per cent speed improvement can generally be achieved.*In many contexts, it is inappropriate to assume that all integers are fixnurns; (fib 50) would result in a bignurn in many Lisp systems. However, if the programmer desires, there are ways of informing TICL to ignore certain types, such as bignum, as was done in this example. This gives the Lisp programmer the ability to get the efficiency of languages like C and Pascal.

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Type checking in an imperfect world

Cited by 13 publications

References 3 publications

Preliminary report on a practical type inference system for common Lisp

Preliminary report on a practical type inference system for common Lisp

Type determination in an optimizing compiler for APL

TICL—A type inference system for Common Lisp

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