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Practical type checking of functions defined on Context-Free languages

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Abstract

A type checking method for the functional language LFC is presented. A distinct feature of LFC is that it uses Context-Free (CF) languages as data types to represent compound data structures. This makes LFC a dynamically typed language. To improve efficiency, a practical type checking method is presented, which consists of both static and dynamic type checking. Although the inclusion relation of CF languages is not decidable, a special subset of the relation is decidable, i.e., the sentential form relation, which can be statically checked. Moreover, most of the expressions in actual LFC programs appear to satisfy this relation according to the statistic data of experiments. So, despite that the static type checking is not complete, it undertakes most of the type checking task. Consequently the run-time efficiency is effectively improved. Another feature of the type checking is that it converts the expressions with implicit structures to structured representation. Structure reconstruction technique is presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100080, Beijing, P.R. China

    Hai-Ming Chen & Yun-Mei Dong

Authors
  1. Hai-Ming Chen
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  2. Yun-Mei Dong
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Hai-Ming Chen or Yun-Mei Dong.

Additional information

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 60103008 and 60273023.

Hai-Ming Chen received his B.S. degree in computer science and technology from University of Science and Technology of China in 1989, and his M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree in computer software and theory from Institute of Software, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 1992 and 1999, respectively. He is now a professor at Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, CAS. He has been working on software reuse, Chinese font techniques, and formal specifications. His recent research interests include formal methods and programming languages.

Yun-Mei Dong graduated from Jilin University in 1956. He is a professor at Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is an academician of CAS. Before 1995, he had worked in several research areas including formal languages, compiler techniques, Chinese font design techniques, and software reuse. His current research interests are in software design methodologies and formal specifications.

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Chen, HM., Dong, YM. Practical type checking of functions defined on Context-Free languages. J. Comput. Sci. & Technol. 19, 840–847 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02973447

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02973447

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