Type Inference of Turbo Pascal

Abstract

Type inference is generally thought of as being an exclusive property of
the functional programming paradigm. We argue that such a feature may be
of significant benefit for also standard imperative languages. We present a
working tool (available by WWW) providing these benefits for a full version
of Turbo Pascal. It has the form of a preprocessor that analyzes programs
in which the type annotations are only partial or even absent. The resulting
program has full type annotations, will be accepted by the standard Turbo
Pascal compiler, and has polymorphic use of procedures resolved by means
of code expansion.

Keywords: imperative languages, type inference.