How to make ad-hoc polymorphism less ad hoc

conference paper
conference paper
Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '89

p. 60-76
https://doi.org/10.1145/75277.75283

Abstract

This paper presents type classes, a new approach to ad-hoc polymorphism. Type classes permit overloading of arithmetic operators such as multiplication, and generalise the “eqtype variables” of Standard ML. Type classes extend the Hindley/Milner polymorphic type system, and provide a new approach to issues that arise in object-oriented programming, bounded type quantification, and abstract data types. This paper provides an informal introduction to type classes, and defines them formally by means of type inference rules.

Keywords

TYPE CLASSES
POLYMORPHISM
AD HOC
ARITHMETIC
GENERALISE
OVERLOADING
QUANTIFICATION
EQTYPE

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