School of Computing

Typeview: A Tool for Understanding Type Errors

Axel Simon, Olaf Chitil, and Frank Huch

In Markus Mohnen and Pieter Koopman, editors, Draft Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Implementation of Functional Languages, pages 182-196, Aachen, Germany, September 2000. Aachener Informatik-Bericht 00-7, RWTH Aachen.

Abstract

In modern statically typed functional languages, type inference is used to determine the type of each function automatically. Whenever this fails, the compiler emits an error message that is often very complex. Sometimes the expression mentioned in the type error message is not the one that is wrong. We therefore implement an interactive tool that allows programmers to browse through the source code of their program and query the types of each expression. If a variable cannot be typed, we would like to present a set of possible types from which the user can decide which is wrong. This should help finding the origin of type errors without detailed knowledge of type inference on the user side.

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Bibtex Record

@inproceedings{1899,
author = {Axel Simon and Olaf Chitil and Frank Huch},
title = {{Typeview: A Tool for Understanding Type Errors}},
month = {September},
year = {2000},
pages = {182-196},
keywords = {determinacy analysis, Craig interpolants},
note = {},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2000/1899},
    publication_type = {inproceedings},
    submission_id = {19821_1083662531},
    booktitle = {Draft Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Implementation of Functional Languages},
    editor = {Markus Mohnen and Pieter Koopman},
    organization = {Aachener Informatik-Bericht 00-7, RWTH Aachen},
    address = {Aachen, Germany},
}

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