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Sound and Complete Flow Typing with Unions, Intersections and Negations

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Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7737))

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Abstract

Flow typing is becoming a popular mechanism for typing existing programs written in untyped languages (e.g. JavaScript, Racket, Groovy). Such systems require intersections for the true-branch of a type test, negations for the false-branch, and unions to capture the flow of information at meet points. Type systems involving unions, intersections and negations require a subtype operator which is non-trivial to implement. Frisch et al. demonstrated that this problem was decidable. However, their proof was not constructive and does not lend itself naturally to an implementation. In this paper, we present a sound and complete algorithm for subtype testing in the presence of unions, intersections and negations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    David J. Pearce

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  1. David J. Pearce
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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Strada Le Grazie 15, 37134, Verona, Italy

    Roberto Giacobazzi  & Isabella Mastroeni  & 

  2. Microsoft Research, 7 JJ Thomason Avenue, CB3 0FB, Cambridge, UK

    Josh Berdine

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Pearce, D.J. (2013). Sound and Complete Flow Typing with Unions, Intersections and Negations. In: Giacobazzi, R., Berdine, J., Mastroeni, I. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7737. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35873-9_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35873-9_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35872-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35873-9

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