Java & Lambda: a Featherweight Story
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We present FJ&Lambda, a new core calculus that extends Featherweight Java (FJ) with interfaces, supporting multiple inheritance, lambda-expressions, and intersection types. Our main goal is to formalise how lambdas and intersection types are grafted on Java 8, by studying their properties in a formal setting. We show how intersection types play a significant role in several cases, in particular in the typecast of a lambda-expression and in the typing of conditional expressions. We also embody interface default methods in FJ&Lambda, since they increase the dynamism of lambda-expressions, by allowing these methods to be called on lambda-expressions. The crucial point in Java 8 and in our calculus is that lambda-expressions can have various types according to the context requirements (target types): indeed, Java code is not correct when lambda-expressions come without target types. In particular, in the operational semantics we must record target types by decorating lambda-expressions, otherwise they would be lost in the runtime expressions. We prove the subject reduction property and progress for the resulting calculus, and we give a type inference algorithm that returns the type of a given program if it is well typed. The design of FJ&Lambda has been driven by the aim of making it a subset of Java 8, while preserving the elegance and compactness of FJ. Indeed, FJ&Lambda programs are typed and behave the same as Java programs.
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