Changeset 70eaa80b for doc/theses/aaron_moss_PhD/phd/introduction.tex

Timestamp:

Apr 23, 2019, 11:28:34 PM (5 years ago)

Author:

Aaron Moss <a3moss@…>

Branches:

ADT, aaron-thesis, arm-eh, ast-experimental, cleanup-dtors, enum, forall-pointer-decay, jacob/cs343-translation, jenkins-sandbox, master, new-ast, new-ast-unique-expr, pthread-emulation, qualifiedEnum

Children:

6eed619

Parents:

3b40801b

Message:

thesis: update discussion of Java type inference

File:

• doc/theses/aaron_moss_PhD/phd/introduction.tex (modified) (1 diff)

doc/theses/aaron_moss_PhD/phd/introduction.tex

@@ -45 +45 @@
 In particular, with the addition of \emph{concepts} in \CCtwenty{}~\cite{C++Concepts}, conforming \CC{} compilers must support a model of type assertions very similar to that in \CFA{}, and the algorithmic techniques used here may prove useful. 
 \cbstart
-Much of the difficulty of type-checking \CFA{} stems from the language design choice to allow type inference from the context of a function call in addition to its arguments; this feature allows the programmers to specify fewer redundant type annotations on functions which are polymorphic in their return type. 
-Java's diamond type-inference operator~\cite{Java-diamond} and the !auto! keyword in \CCeleven{} support similar but sharply restricted forms of this contextual inference -- the demonstration of the richer inference in \CFA{} raises possibilities for similar features in future versions of these languages. 
-Scala~\cite{Scala}, by contrast, already supports a similarly-powerful \emph{local type inference} model~\cite{Pierce00,Odersky01}, so the algorithmic techniques in this thesis may be effective for Scala compiler implementors. 
-\cbend
+Much of the difficulty of type-checking \CFA{} stems from the language design choice to allow type inference from the context of a function call in addition to its arguments; this feature allows the programmers to specify fewer redundant type annotations on functions which are polymorphic in their return type.
+\cbend \cbstartx
+The !auto! keyword in \CCeleven{} supports a similar but sharply restricted form of this contextual inference -- the demonstration of the richer inference in \CFA{} raises possibilities for similar features in future versions of \CC{}. 
+By contrast, Java~8~\cite{Java8} and Scala~\cite{Scala} use comparably powerful forms of type inference, so the algorithmic techniques in this thesis may be effective for those languages' compiler implementors. 
+\cbendx
 Type environments are also widely modelled in compiler implementations, particularly for functional languages, though also increasingly commonly for other languages (such as Rust~\cite{Rust}) which perform type inference; the type environment presented here may be useful to those language implementors.