Several Types of Types in Programming Languages - History and Philosophy of Computing Access content directly
Conference Papers Year : 2016

Several Types of Types in Programming Languages

Abstract

Types are an important part of any modern programming language, but we often forget that the concept of type we understand nowadays is not the same it was perceived in the sixties. Moreover, we conflate the concept of " type " in programming languages with the concept of the same name in mathematical logic, an identification that is only the result of the convergence of two different paths, which started apart with different aims. The paper will present several remarks (some historical, some of more conceptual character) on the subject, as a basis for a further investigation. We will argue that there are three different characters at play in programming languages, all of them now called types: the technical concept used in language design to guide implementation ; the general abstraction mechanism used as a modelling tool; the classifying tool inherited from mathematical logic. We will suggest three possible dates ad quem for their presence in the programming language literature, suggesting that the emergence of the concept of type in computer science is relatively independent from the logical tradition, until the Curry-Howard isomorphism will make an explicit bridge between them.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
pisa-proceedings-corrected.pdf (210.91 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)
Loading...

Dates and versions

hal-01399694 , version 1 (20-11-2016)

Identifiers

Cite

Simone Martini. Several Types of Types in Programming Languages. 3rd International Conference on History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC), Oct 2015, Pisa, Italy. pp.216-227, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-47286-7_15⟩. ⟨hal-01399694⟩
1026 View
658 Download

Altmetric

Share

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More