Extensions to Type Classes and Pattern Match Checking

Static typing is one of the most prominent techniques in the design of programming languages for making software more safe and more reusable. Furthermore, it provides opportunities for compilers to automatically generate boilerplate code, using mathematical foundations. In this thesis, we extend upon the design of Haskell, a general-purpose functional programming language with strong static typing, to offer more opportunities for reasoning, abstraction, and static code generation. More specifically, we improve upon two features: pattern matching and type classes. Pattern matching denotes the act of performing case-analysis on the shape of a value, thus enabling a program to behave differently, depending on input information. With the advent of extensions such as Generalized Algebraic Data Types (GADTs), pattern guards, and view patterns, the task of reasoning about pattern matching has become much more complex. Though existing approaches can deal with some of these features, no existing algorithm can accurately reason about pattern matching in the presence of all of them, thus hindering the ability of the compiler to guide the development process. The first part of this thesis presents a short, easy-to-understand, and modular algorithm which can reason about lazy pattern matching with GADTs and guards. We have implemented our algorithm in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. The second part of this thesis extends upon the design of type classes, one of the most distinctive features of Haskell for function overloading and type-level programming. We develop three independent extensions that lift the expressive power of type classes from simple Horn clauses to a significant fragment of first-order logic, thus offering more possibilities for expressive type-level programming and automated code generation. The first feature, Quantified Class Constraints, lifts the language of constraints from simple Horn clauses to Harrop formulae. It significantly increases the modelling power of type classes, while at the same time it enables a terminating type class resolution for a larger class of applications. The second feature, Functional Dependencies, extends type classes with implicit type-level functions. Though functional dependencies have been implemented in Haskell compilers for almost two decades, several aspects of their semantics have been ill-understood. Thus, existing implementations of functional dependencies significantly deviate from their specification. We present a novel formalization of functional dependencies that addresses all such problems, and give the first type inference algorithm for functional dependencies that successfully elaborates the feature into a statically-typed intermediate language. The third feature, Bidirectional Instances, allows for the interpretation of class instances bidirectionally, thus indirectly adding the biconditional connective in the language of constraints. This extension significantly improves the interaction of GADTs and type classes, since it allows functions with qualified types to perform structural induction over indexed types. Moreover, under this interpretation class-based extensions such as functional dependencies and associated types become much more expressive. In summary, this thesis extends upon existing and develops new type-level features, promoting the usage of rich types that can capture and statically enforce program properties.

Publication year:2018

Accessibility:Open