[q-lang-users] H/M-based typing for Q

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Hi all,

James Litsios recently pointed me to this webpage by Nathan Whitehead, a
UCSC PhD student who has been working on QT, a dialect/sublanguage of Q
with a Hindley/Milner-based type system:

http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~nwhitehe/qt.html

The interesting thing is that Nathan's type system offers much more
flexibility than basic H/M, which makes it much more suitable for a
dynamic language like Q with its ad-hoc polymorphism. From the webpage:
"QT adds a nice type system to Q. The additional type system is designed
to be as unobtrusive as possible. It supports automatic type inference,
higher order types, unconstrainted polymorphic types, and "delayed"
evaluation types."

Not much additional documentation is available right now, so we'll have
to dig into the ML code to find out how it works, but Nathan has
promised that he'll write up something to make his work more accessible.
It's not clear to me at this point whether his system can be massaged to
support the full Q language, but I think it's worth taking a look.

What do you think about this? Would adding a more elaborate type system
to Q be a wanted improvement? Obviously it might make Q programming a
little safer, and type inference might also help to generate faster code
in a native code compiler. But there might be drawbacks as well...

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag