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clarification of recently-posted abstract
Standard ML weak polymorphism and imperative constructs
My Hoang John Mitchell Ramesh Viswanathan
Department of Computer Science
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
{hoang, mitchell, vramesh}@cs.stanford.edu
The recently-posted abstract may be somewhat misleading regarding the
difference between Standard ML, as specified in the formal definition,
and Standard ML of New Jersey, a popular implementation of the language.
The typing of imperative constructs in Standard ML is fully specified in
the formal definition [1], and proved correct in [2,3]. It is the SML-NJ
implementation, which differs from the formal definition, that uses weak
type variables and has not been analyzed previously. The main differences
between the two approaches are explained in the paper.
Sorry for any confusion on this point.
John Mitchell
[1] @book{MTH90,
author = "Robin Milner and Mads Tofte and Robert Harper",
title = "The Definition of {Standard ML}",
publisher = "MIT Press",
year = "1990"
}
[2] @PhdThesis{tofte,
author = "Mads Tofte",
title = "Operational Semantics and
Polymorphic Type Inference",
school = "Edinburgh University",
year = "1988",
note = "Available as Edinburgh University
Laboratory for Foundations
of Computer Science Technical Report
ECS--LFCS--88--54."
}
[3] @article(Tofte90,
author="Tofte, M.",
Title="Type inference for polymorphic references",
journal="Information and Computation",
Volume="89",Number="1",Year="1990",pages="1--34")