conference paper
Java and Scala's Type Systems are Unsound: The Existential Crisis of Null Pointers
2015
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications
We present short programs that demonstrate the unsoundness of Java and Scala’s current type systems. In particular, these programs provide parametrically polymorphic functions that can turn any type into any type without (down)casting. Fortunately, parametric polymorphism was not integrated into the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), so these examples do not demonstrate any unsoundness of the JVM. Nonetheless, we discuss broader implications of these findings on the field of programming languages.
Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Tate, Ross
Date Issued
2015
Published in
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications
Subjects
Editorial or Peer reviewed
REVIEWED
Written at
EPFL
EPFL units
| Event name | Event place | Event date |
Amsterdam, Netherlands | November 02 - 04, 2016 | |
Available on Infoscience
March 31, 2017
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