Source file: nominal-types.fut

Faking nominal types

Futhark’s type system is entirely structural. If we want to maintain values of the same representation but of different semantic meaning, and wish to avoid mixing them together, then one trick is to use unary sum types:

type temperature = #temperature f32

type height = #height f32

This saves us from ever mixing temperatures and heights, at the cost of having to wrap and unwrap the constructor (this is free at runtime, though).

However, nominal type systems have another advantage: they can hide the definition. Futhark’s module system supports abstract types, which can also hide the definition, but then there is no way to actually get your hands on the concrete value. In other languages, nominal types are sometimes used to hide a complex type behind a simpler name, with the expectation that this name will also be used in type errors. In contrast, Futhark’s type checker will usually expose all the verbose guts of e.g. large records or sum types in type errors.

There is a clumsy way to simulate such nominal types using a higher-order module. We define the parametric module nominal as thus:

module nominal (T: { type raw }) : {
  type t
  val name : T.raw -> t
  val shame : t -> T.raw
} = {
  type t = T.raw
  def name = id
  def shame = id
}

We can then apply it like this:

module temperature = nominal { type raw = temperature }
module height = nominal { type raw = height }

There is now an abstract type temperature.t whose definition is completely hidden. However, the two inverse functions temperature.name and temperature.shame allow us to convert between temperature.t and the temperature type:

def x : temperature.t = temperature.name (#temperature 2)

def y : temperature = temperature.shame x

It’s certainly awkward, but it may come in handy from time to time.