Type Inference Problems: A Survey

It is well recognized that types play an important role in programming. In strongly typed programming languages types serve as a device that helps to prevent the kind of errors as an application of an operator to an incompatible operand, such as indexing on a non-array variable. Hence, types in programming can be viewed as a safety mechanism. This is what types are good for. However, the price for working in a strongly typed environment is that the types can get very large. Hence, if types are to be explicit in every programming construct, then this may seriously affect readibility of a program, as well as it may cause severe difficulties when debugging the program. A possible solution to the above problem is to work in a system where types can be omitted from programs and retrieved from the program structure when needed.

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