A theory of type polymorphism in programming

1978/12/01 by Robin Milner · 2,211 citations
Computer Science · Mathematics · #Biology #Computer science #Genetics #Genotype #Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge #Logic, programming, and type systems #Mathematics #Polymorphism (computer science) #Type (biology) #Type theory #semigroups and automata theory

paper · open access · doi:10.1016/0022-0000(78)90014-4

published in Journal of Computer and System Sciences 17(3), 348-375 (Elsevier BV)

openalex publication_date 1978/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Cited by

• In Search of Types
• Typed Generic Traversal With Term Rewriting Strategies
• TypeDis: A Type System for Disentanglement
• Reflection and Hyper-Programming in Persistent Programming Systems
• GNU epsilon -- an extensible programming language
• Revisiting Elementary Denotational Semantics
• Oxide: The Essence of Rust
• A bottom-up polymorphic type inference in logic programming
• Modeling of languages for tensor manipulation
• Improving Testability and Reuse by Transitioning to Functional Programming
• Deciding not to Decide: Sound and Complete Effect Inference in the Presence of Higher-Rank Polymorphism
• Demystifying React Native Android Apps for Static Analysis
• PolySkill: Learning Generalizable Skills Through Polymorphic Abstraction
• A Complementary Approach to Incorrectness Typing
• Operational methods in semantics
• Category-Theoretic Quantitative Compositional Distributional Models of Natural Language Semantics
• The Design Principles of the Elixir Type System
• Kima - an Automated Error Correction System for Concurrent Logic Programs
• Evaluating Program Semantics Reasoning with Type Inference in System F
• Code Less to Code More: Streamlining Language Server Protocol and Type System Development for Language Families
• Type Safe Extensible Programming
• Understanding Haskell-style Overloading via Open Data and Open Functions
• SoK: Hardware Security Support for Trustworthy Execution
• OptTyper: Probabilistic Type Inference by Optimising Logical and Natural Constraints
• Generic Programming of Reusable, High Performance Container Types using Automatic Type Hierarchy Inference and Bidirectional Antichain Typing
• Compiling a functional language
• Destabilizing Iris
• Linguine: A Natural-Language Programming Language with Formal Semantics and a Clean Compiler Pipeline
• Improved Inference for Checking Annotations
• On the Formalization of Importance Measures using HOL Theorem Proving
• Patterns for Name Analysis and Type Analysis with JastAdd
• Well-Typed Languages are Sound
• Well-Behaved Model Transformations with Model Subtyping
• Explicit and Controllable Assignment Semantics
• Automated proof synthesis for propositional logic with deep neural networks
• A history of Haskell
• A Type Checking Algorithm for Higher-rank, Impredicative and Second-order Types
• Phantom Types and Subtyping
• Functional Programming and Security
• Multi-Level Languages are Generalized Arrows
• Going beyond templates: composition and evolution in nested OSTRICH
• Expansion for Universal Quantifiers
• A Dependently Typed Multi-Stage Calculus
• Decidable By Construction: Design-Time Verification for Trustworthy AI
• A Polymorphic RPC Calculus
• Type inference and semi-unification
• Simple imperative polymorphism
• Very concurrent mark-&-sweep garbage collection without fine-grain synchronization
• Types for Units-of-Measure: Theory and Practice
• Conception, evolution, and application of functional programming languages
• Polymorphic type inference
• Towards Typed Prolog
• The unification type of Lukasiewicz logic with a bounded number of variables
• Tiers of ontology and consistency constraints in geographical information systems
• On understanding types, data abstraction, and polymorphism
• Genericity versus inheritance
• Dependent types in practical programming
• Propositions as types
• Semantics of a Relational λ-Calculus (Extended Version)
• Implementation of the typed call-by-value λ-calculus using a stack of regions
• Type inference with polymorphic recursion
• Polymorphic type schemes and recursive definitions
• Type reconstruction in the presence of polymorphic recursion
• Bidirectional Typing
• Principal Typings in a Restricted Intersection Type System for Beta Normal Forms with De Bruijn Indices
• Lucid
• A simple semantics for Haskell overloading
• How to make ad-hoc polymorphism less ad hoc
• RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language
• Parametric polymorphism [wikipedia]
• Chemoinformatics and structural bioinformatics in OCaml. [europepmc]
• Higher-Ranked Annotation Polymorphic Dependency Analysis [europepmc]
• Soundness Conditions for Big-Step Semantics [europepmc]