Generic Programming with Extensible Data Types: Or, Making Ad Hoc Extensible Data Types Less Ad Hoc

We present a novel approach to generic programming over extensible data types. Row types capture the structure of records and variants, and can be used to express record and variant subtyping, record extension, and modular composition of case branches. We extend row typing to capture generic program...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of ACM on programming languages Vol. 7; no. ICFP; pp. 356 - 384
Main Authors: Hubers, Alex, Morris, J. Garrett
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 30.08.2023
Subjects:
Data types and structures
Software and its engineering
Theory of computation
Type theory
qualified types
generic programming
row polymorphism
row types
extensible data types
ISSN:2475-1421, 2475-1421
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We present a novel approach to generic programming over extensible data types. Row types capture the structure of records and variants, and can be used to express record and variant subtyping, record extension, and modular composition of case branches. We extend row typing to capture generic programming over rows themselves, capturing patterns including lifting operations to records and variations from their component types, and the duality between cases blocks over variants and records of labeled functions, without placing specific requirements on the fields or constructors present in the records and variants. We formalize our approach in System R , an extension of F with row types, and give a denotational semantics for (stratified) R in Agda.
ISSN:2475-1421
2475-1421
DOI:10.1145/3607843