15-312 Foundations of Programming Languages
Lecture 13: Recursive Types

This lecture given by Matt Moore

After the discussion of universal types (for parametric polymorphism) and existential types (for data abstraction), we now discuss recursive types in order to model recursive data structures such as lists or trees. We show how ML's datatype construct can be thought of as a composition of recursive types and existential types, to provide some amount of abstraction.

Recursive types have some other interesting properties. For example, in the absence of recursive expressions, all expressions in MinML terminate unless we add recursive types.


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Frank Pfenning