Abstract

Intensional polymorphism, the ability to dispatch to di#erent routines based on types at run time, enables a variety of advanced implementation techniques for polymorphic languages, including tag-free garbage collection, unboxed function arguments, polymorphic marshalling, and flattened data structures. To date, languages that support intensional polymorphism have required a type-passing (as opposed to type-erasure) interpretation where types are constructed and passed to polymorphic functions at run time. Unfortunately, type-passing su#ers from a number of drawbacks: it requires duplication of run-time constructs at the term and type levels, it prevents abstraction, and it severely complicates polymorphic closure conversion.

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