Towards Fully Controlled Overloading Across Module Boundaries

This paper proposes a set of modularisation constructs as well as a new implementation technique for overloading functions across module boundaries. In contrast to existing approaches, it allows to fully preserve separation of namespaces and it supports overloading of recursive functions in the context of subtyping, which in fact requires support for mutual recursion across module boundaries. Based on a very simple applied λ-calculus as core language, the modularisation constructs are defined and a transformation scheme into an applied λ-calculus is presented. Furthermore, an outline of an implementation in the context of the functional programming language SaC is given.