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POPL
2008
ACM

Foundations for structured programming with GADTs

14 years 11 months ago
Foundations for structured programming with GADTs
GADTs are at the cutting edge of functional programming and become more widely used every day. Nevertheless, the semantic foundations underlying GADTs are not well understood. In this paper we solve this problem by showing that the standard theory of data types as carriers of initial algebras of functors can be extended from algebraic and nested data types to GADTs. We then use this observation to derive an initial algebra semantics for GADTs, thus ensuring that all of the accumulated knowledge about initial algebras can be brought to bear on them. Next, we use our initial algebra semantics for GADTs to derive expressive and principled tools -analogous to the well-known and widely-used ones for algebraic and nested data types -- for reasoning about, programming with, and improving the performance of programs involving, GADTs; we christen such a collection of tools for a GADT an initial algebra package. Along the way, we give a constructive demonstration that every GADT can be reduced ...
Patricia Johann, Neil Ghani
Added 03 Dec 2009
Updated 03 Dec 2009
Type Conference
Year 2008
Where POPL
Authors Patricia Johann, Neil Ghani
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