Regular Expressions of Types – Oleg Grenrus

Oleg Grenrus explains how regular expressions can be integrated into static type systems, building a prototype Haskell extension to demonstrate the concept.

A neat feature of clojure.spec is regular expressions for describing shapes of (heterogenous, i.e. non-uniform) sequences. It can be used as an argument against static type systems. Type systems cannot have such things, can they? In this talk, we'll see that, in fact, regular expressions are a nice theory, which can be fitted into type systems. We'll discuss some of the properties of regular expressions, which make them a suitable and convenient to use addition. To make that concrete, we'll build a prototype Haskell extension, and see it working! Slides: oleg.fi/gists/posts/2018-09-13-regular-expressions-of-types.…