[TYPES] breaking abstraction with ML exceptions

[Andrew Myers]

Yizhou Zhang and I made similar observations about unchecked exceptions violating abstraction in our PLDI'16 paper. We also proposed and implemented a new exception semantics that addresses the problem, tunneled exceptions.
Andrew

-------- Original message --------From: François Pottier <francois.pottier at inria.fr> Date: 3/28/18  10:04 AM  (GMT-05:00) To: types-list at LISTS.SEAS.UPENN.EDU Subject: Re: [TYPES] breaking abstraction with ML exceptions 
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Hi Sam,

Le 28/03/2018 à 15:20, Sam Lindley a écrit :
> My motivation is understanding how this kind of pattern interacts with 
> various designs for effect type systems that track exceptions - and 
> whether one could perhaps get away with forbidding it.

In OCaml, it might seem tempting to forbid the exception-aliasing
declaration, "exception A = B". But I believe that that still would not 
be sufficient
to eliminate exception aliasing, by which I mean the possibility that
a single (dynamic) exception is known under two distinct (static) names.
This is due to other language features that introduce aliasing, such
as module aliasing declarations ("module A = B") and first-class
modules (a function that expects two first-class modules as arguments
can be applied twice to the same module).

-- 
François Pottier
francois.pottier at inria.fr
http://gallium.inria.fr/~fpottier/