Friday, September 25, 2015

Mathematics influences Wombat again

In Wombat, types form a lattice (an order lattice) generated by isA declarations. The sup/lub/join is Union, the inf/glb/meet is Intersection. Unions between otherwise unrelated types are new types created as required. The intersection is just the union of types below all the types being intersected. So, for some examples: Integer isA Rational, Integer isA GaussianInteger. Union[Integer Rational] is Rational, but Union[Integer String] is a new type (with few properties, just the ability to extract one or other). And, of course, Intersection[Rational GaussianInteger] is Integer. The intersection of unrelated types is the type Empty, which has no values.

[notational note: list entries are separated by spaces. The parameter of Union and of Intersection is a set of types, but can be given as a list as I have done here (because, in a forgetful way, List X convertsTo Set X). The / operator invoked below takes 2 Integers and returns a Rational.]

I've been following along, in a desultory way, with a Mathematics discussion (https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2015/09/the_free_modular_lattice_on_3.html) where I learnt of the difference between a lattice (which has sups and infs for finite sets of members of the lattice) and a bounded lattice which also has sups and infs for an empty set of members. Things usually work better when you include these degenerate cases, so I thought: I wonder if I can make Wombat's type hierarchy into a bounded lattice.

It doesn't take much imagination to see that Union[] is going to be Empty. And then it is natural, looking at everything upside down, to see that Intersection[] is the type Any which is the Union of all types.

Now consider the list [7 3/2 4/5]. What is this a list of? It is naturally a list of the Union of the types of its elements. Since those types are Integer and Rational, the result is a List Rational (as any ordinary mortal would expect).

So what is the type of the empty list []? The set of types of the members is the empty set. The Union is thus type Empty. So [] is a List Empty. But we've seen that Empty is below any other type X, so Empty isA X. So a List Empty isA List X for any X. Which is exactly what you need to allow the empty list to be used in the situations where one might want to use it.

3 comments:

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  2. I previously said: " (because, in a forgetful way, List X isA Set X) ". Of course isA is never forgetful: it must somehow remember. Corrected to "convertsTo".

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  3. And now, 7 years later, I realised that Intersection[X Y] cannot be the the Union of stuff below X and Y. Yes it must have the same elements, but it will only have the properties inherited from X and Y, whereas the Union of stuff below might have other properties inherited from other higher things in addition to X and Y.

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