[Types-sig] Re: Revive the types sig?

[Daniel Wang]

Paul Prescod <paulp@activestate.com> writes:

> Disclaimer: I am not the types-czar. I will design one system with the
> help of people who are like-minded. You can design another with
> different goals if you like. Guido can choose.
> 

Before you give up the ship on static types... are you aware of the work by 
Henglein and Rehof? 

  Safe Polymorphic Type Inference for a Dynamically Typed Language:
  Translating Scheme to ML.

  Proceedings FPCA '95, ACM SIGPLAN-SIGARCH Conference on Functional
  Programming Languages and Computer Architecture, La Jolla, California, June
  1995.

 We describe a new method for polymorphic type inference for the dynamically
 typed language Scheme. The method infers both types and explicit run-time
 type operations (coercions) for a given program. It can be used to
 statically debug Scheme programs and to give a high-level translation to
 ML, in essence providing an ``embedding'' of Scheme into ML.

 http://www.research.microsoft.com/~rehof/fpca95.ps

Perhaps, there's a bit too much type-theory for most readers. Everyone,
should get past the first page or two. But it basically outlines an approch
that lets dynamic typing and static typing to coexist relatively
painlessly. A good deal of the papers talks about how todo inference, but
you can probably just ignore inference and use some of the ideas there for
an explicitly typed system, for which a type inference engine could be
built later.

If people, are utterly confused I can attempt to decode specific questions
about the paper.