Type Inference for Turbo Pascal

Abstract

Type inference is generally thought of as being an exclusive property of the functional programming paradigm. We argue that such a feature may be of significant benefit for also standard imperative languages. We present a working tool (available by WWW) providing these benefits for a full version of Turbo Pascal. It has the form of a preprocessor that analyzes programs in which the type annotations are only partial or even absent. The resulting program has full type annotations, will be accepted by the standard Turbo Pascal compiler, and has polymorphic use of procedures resolved by means of code expansion. Keywords: imperative languages, type inference.