Incremental Type Inference for Software Engineering

Software engineering focused type inference can enhance programmer productivity in statically typed objectoriented languages. Type inference is a system of automatically inferring the argument and return types of a function. It provides considerable programming convenience, because the programmer can realize the benefits of a statically typed language without manually entering the type annotations. We study the problem of type inference in object-oriented languages and propose an incremental, programmer-aided approach. Code is added one method at a time and missing types are inferred if possible. We present a specification and algorithm for inferring simple object-oriented types in this kind of incremental development environment.