lib-laddertypes

Rust Implementation of Ladder-Types (parsing, unification, rewriting, etc)

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Ladder Types

Ladder Types provide a way to distinguish between multiple concrete representations of the same abstract / conceptual type.

The intuition is to capture a 'represented-as' relation in the structure of a type term. Formally, we introduce a new type constructor, called the ladder type, written as T1 ~ T2, where T1 and T2 are types. The term T1 ~ T2 can be read by T1 is represented as T2.

This can be particularly useful in contexts where no standard representational forms exist, e.g. in the unix shell where many different tools & utilities come into contact, each making use of potentially different representational forms, depending on the application domain.

Trying to introduce a global type system at IPC level would result in naming conflicts: Abstract concepts like 'natural number' do not have any standard representational form, as it is the case with other more contained languages. With a simple type name like this it is not clear which of the many equivalent representations is required, e.g. for an integer number variations over radices, endianness, digit encoding etc. exist.

Usually, many layers of abstraction are built ontop of each other, where higher-level data types are encoded into lower-level data types, forming a chain of embeddings from concept to `rock bottom' of byte streams.

Example

The following type describes a colon-separated sequence of timepoints, each represented as unix-timestamp written as decimal number in big-endian, encoded as UTF-8 string.

<Seq Timepoint
     ~<TimeSince UnixEpoch>
     ~<Duration Seconds>
     ~ℕ
     ~<PosInt 10 BigEndian>
     ~<Seq <Digit 10>~Char>>
~<SepSeq Char ':'>
~<Seq Char>
~UTF-8
~<Seq Byte>

An object that fits the format described by this type could look like this:

1696093021:1696093039:1528324679:1539892301:1638141920:1688010253

License

GPLv3