The type inference and coercion facilities in the scratchpad II interpreter

Abstract

The Scratchpad II system is an abstract datatype programming language, a compiler for the language, a library of packages of polymorphic functions and parametrized abstract datatypes, and an interpreter that provides sophisticated type inference and coercion facilities. Although originally designed for the implementation of symbolic mathematical algorithms, Scratchpad II is a general purpose programming language. This paper discusses aspects of the implementation of the interpreter and how it attempts to provide a user friendly and relatively weakly typed front end for the strongly typed programming language.