13.6 Notes

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13.6 Notes

The presentation in this chapter is adapted from a treatment by Harper (1994, 1996). An account in a similar style is given by Wright and Felleisen (1994).

The combination of references (or other computational effects) with ML-style polymorphic type inference raises some quite subtle problems (cf. §22.7) and has received a good deal of attention in the research literature. See Tofte (1990), Hoang et al. (1993), Jouvelot and Gifford (1991), Talpin and Jouvelot (1992), Leroy and Weis (1991), Wright (1992), Harper (1994, 1996), and the references cited there.

Static prediction of possible aliasing is a long-standing problem both in compiler implementation (where it is called alias analysis) and in programming language theory. An influential early attempt by Reynolds (1978, 1989) coined the term syntactic control of interference. These ideas have recently seen a burst of new activity—see O'Hearn et al. (1995) and Smith et al. (2000). More general reasoning techniques for aliasing are discussed in Reynolds (1981) and Ishtiaq and O'Hearn (2001) and other references cited there.

A comprehensive discussion of garbage collection can be found in Jones and Lins (1996). A more semantic treatment is given by Morrisett et al. (1995).

Find out the cause of this effect, Or rather say, the cause of this defect, For this effect defective comes by cause. —Hamlet II, ii, 101

The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. —Buddhist saying

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