Towards an implementation of Polymorphic C

Abstract

Functional programming languages incorporate a number of powerful features, including advanced polymorphic type systems and first-class, higher- order functions. However, these important features have had little effect on popular imperative languages such as C. As part of the Advanced Type Systems Project at NPS, a dialect of C called Polymorphic C has been designed which integrates an advanced polymorphic type system into C. In order to implement full parametric polymorphism while retaining the run time efficiency of C, it is necessary to allow mixed data representations. We recommend adopting a variant of the program translation methods first proposed by Leroy to implement mixed data representations in ML for use in Polymorphic C.