Essential Language Support for Generic Programming

Essential Language Support for Generic Programming by Jeremy Siek and Andrew Lumsdaine.

This paper presents an extension of System F called System F^G. The motivation for the work is in the construction of generic algorithms and, more importantly, the verification of their use. It looks to me as though the authors have taken a little bit too much of C++ on board.

The concepts of the paper are very similar to Haskell's type classes (according to section two, the main difference is that type classes are designed to allow Hindley-Milner type inference) and the associated types seem to me to be filling a similar role as functional dependancies. I found it rather interesting and it's the first type system paper I've read since I achieved a vague understanding of type systems.

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