Type_erasure

Type erasure

Type erasure

Process by which explicit type annotations are removed from a program

In programming languages, type erasure is the load-time process by which explicit type annotations are removed from a program, before it is executed at run-time. Operational semantics not requiring programs to be accompanied by types are named type-erasure semantics, in contrast with type-passing semantics. Type-erasure semantics is an abstraction principle, ensuring that the run-time execution of a program doesn't depend on type information. In the context of generic programming, the opposite of type erasure is named reification.[1]

Type inference

Main article: Type inference

The reverse operation is named type inference. Though type erasure can be an easy way to define typing over implicitly typed languages (an implicitly typed term is well-typed if and only if it is the erasure of a well-typed explicitly typed lambda term), it doesn't provide Rule of inference for this definition.

See also

References

  1. [1]
    Langer, Angelika. "What is reification?".


Stub icon

This computer science article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Type_erasure, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.