TyS - A Framework to Facilitate the Implementation of Object-Oriented Type Checkers

Abstract

Type systems are mainly aimed at providing the absence of erroneous behaviors. Their formalization is commonly used to prove specific safety properties, but those formal specifications are not usually used to implement the language. Once a type system has been proven to be sound, a type checker must be developed in the implementation of the language processor. In this article we present TyS, a framework to facilitate the implementation of type checkers, following widely known object-oriented design patterns. TyS processes a type system specification file, generating the implementation of the corresponding type checker. The generated code relies on an API provided by the framework, and it can be reutilized by the rest of components and tools used in the language implementation. TyS has been used with different lexer and parser tools, developing both dynamic and static type systems