A soft-typing system for Erlang

Abstract

This paper presents a soft-typing system for the programming language Erlang. The system is based on two concepts; a (forward) data flow analysis that determines upper approximations of the possible values of expressions and other constructs, and a specification language that allows the programmer to specify the interface of a module. We examine the programming language Erlang and point to various aspects of the language that make it hard to type. We present experimental result of applying the soft-typing system to some previously written programs.