A polymorphic type system for prolog (original) (raw)

We describe a polymorphic type scheme for Prolog which makes static type checking possible. Polymorphism gives a good degree of flexibility to the type system, and makes it intrude very little on a user's programming style. The only additions to the language are type declarations, which an interpreter can ignore if it so desires, with the guarantee that a well-typed program will behave identically with or without type checking. Our implementation is discussed and we observe that the type resolution problem for a Prolog program is another Prolog (meta)program.