Blame Tracking and Type Error Debugging

Abstract

In this work, we present an unexpected connection between gradual typing and type error debugging. Namely, we illustrate that gradual typing provides a natural way to defer type errors in statically illtyped programs, providing more feedback than traditional approaches to deferring type errors. When evaluating expressions that lead to runtime type errors, the usefulness of the feedback depends on blame tracking, the defacto approach to locating the cause of such runtime type errors. Unfortunately, blame tracking suffers from the bias problem for type error localization in languages with type inference. We illustrate and formalize the bias problem for blame tracking, present ideas for adapting existing type error debugging techniques to combat this bias, and outline further challenges. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → Type structures