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Early Experience in Teaching the Basics of Functional Language Design with a Language Type Checker

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Trends in Functional Programming (TFP 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12053))

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Abstract

In this paper we set forth the thesis that a language type checker can be an effective tool in teaching language design principles of functional languages. We have used \(TypeSoundnessCertifier \), a tool for type checking languages and certifying their soundness, in the context of a graduate course in programming languages. In this paper we offer details on how the course took place, and we report on some data gathered during evaluations. Although the work reported in this paper is not statistically significant, we share our experience to show the type of studies that we are conducting, and to inspire similar and larger studies towards gathering evidence for, or against, our thesis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A constraint of our system is that it works with closed terms as values, therefore a variable x cannot be declared as a value.

  2. 2.

    This is not a novelty. The Ott language, for example, achieved the same effect previously.

  3. 3.

    For those language definitions that \(TypeSoundnessCertifier \) type check as type sound, the tool also produces a machine-checked proof in the Abella theorem prover [1, 4], hence the name of the tool. However, we are not concerned with this aspect of the tool.

  4. 4.

    Advanced features included monads, gradual typing [16, 17], and data race freedom in the Rust type system, to name a few.

  5. 5.

    Since a solution for the ordinary filter operation is comparable to that of \(\mathtt {map}\), and \(\mathtt {map}\) has been given as exercise (see Sect. 2.2), we preferred to make the exam more difficult with \(\mathtt {filterOpt}\).

References

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dale Miller and Jeremy Siek for their comments on Sect. 1.1. We are thankful to our anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, which improved this paper. Also, we thank the students who participated to the study being reported.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, 01854, USA

    Matteo Cimini

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  1. Matteo Cimini
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Correspondence to Matteo Cimini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    William J. Bowman

  2. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Ronald Garcia

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Cimini, M. (2020). Early Experience in Teaching the Basics of Functional Language Design with a Language Type Checker. In: Bowman, W., Garcia, R. (eds) Trends in Functional Programming. TFP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12053. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47147-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47147-7_2

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