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The Theory of Classification
Part 7: A Class is a Type Family



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This is the seventh article in a regular series on object-oriented type theory, aimed specifically at non-theoreticians. So far, we have built up a model of objects as simple records, which are instances of corresponding record types [1]. Initially, we took the seemingly attractive view that a programmer's class in C++ or Java corresponds in some way to a type in the formal model, and that a compatible subclass therefore corresponds to a subtype [2], linking this with an algebraic description of subtype-compatible semantic behaviour [3]. Naturally, the class-construct in an object-oriented language also defines an implementation for the instances of the class, but there is no formal contradiction here in considering just the typeful aspects of class declarations. Subtyping does indeed provide a simple, flexible model for type compatibility, but we shall find that it is not always as useful as we might expect.

We shall discover circumstances in which a type system based on subtyping breaks down, providing less than useful information. Object-oriented languages like Smalltalk and Eiffel exhibit sophisticated, systematic kinds of behaviour which cannot adequately be described in terms of types and subtyping. By appealing to natural notions of classification in biology, we shall demonstrate the extent to which the subtyping model fails to capture the intuitive notion of a class. In this article, we shall define the notion of class formally, and prove that it is more than just a type. To understand this, we will need to extend our formal model to include type polymorphism. This requires the second-order -calculus and notions of universal [4, 5] and function-bounded quantification [6, 7].


There used to be a popular rhyming couplet that joked about the terminology used in the biological classification of the animal kingdom:

Cats have kittens, dogs have puppies,
But guppies just have baby guppies.

While every species has young of its own kind, the biologists seemed to have left some holes in the taxonomy, surely an oversight! What is more disturbing is that most object-oriented languages will assert that Dog, Cat and Guppy, by virtue of being kinds of Animal, all mate with an Animal and produce an offspring, which is (you guessed) an Animal, something forced upon recursive types by the rules of subtyping. To see why, let us express the reproducing behaviour of all animals (ignoring litters of offspring) formally as:

This defines Animal as a recursive record type whose methods (most of which are not shown) include the mate method. In such a recursive definition, to refer to the whole record (the earlier articles [1, 2] explain this notation). Once the recursion is established, we can access the type of the mate method as:

showing that an Animal mates with an Animal and produces an Animal offspring, suitably capturing the general notion. Intuitively, we should like to introduce the Animal subclasses Dog, Cat (and even Guppy), such that these creatures all mate with, and produce young of their own kind, in the uniformly specialised style:

We might expect Cat and Dog to be subtypes of Animal; however this is not the case, since they both redefine the signature of the mate method a way that violates subtyping. The function subtyping rule allows a subtype function to have more general arguments and a more specific result [2]. Here, the Dog type replaces the signature Animal Dog, which unhelpfully specialises both argument and result. The best we could do while still preserving subtyping is to break with uniform specialisation and invent strangely retyped versions of mate which still accept Animal arguments:

This ensures that Dogs produce puppies, but still allows a Dog to mate with any kind of Animal, which seems intuitively wrong, but is formally correct by the rules of subtyping. The Animal type declared that its mate method always accepts an argument of at least the Animal type and we cannot go back on this, particularly if we expect to invoke Dog.mate dynamically through an Animal variable and supply any legal Animal argument.

In general, recursion interacts poorly with subtyping. If any type T has a method that is closed over its own type: T.m : T S. If we want to establish a subtype relationship S <: T, then for the replaced method m to be a subtype, we have to show, on the result-side, that S <: T, which is consistent, and also show, on the argument-side, that T <: S, which is precisely the opposite of the relationship we seek. The only condition under which both S <: T and T <: S is if S = T!

This is one reason why redefined methods cannot change their types in languages with both type recursion and subtyping. Consider that in Java, the equals method is recursively typed at the root: Object.equals : Object Boolean, making every Java type recursive. Recursion fixes the type of this method, which can never be specialised. This leads to a damaging lack of expressiveness: any redefinition of equals must still accept a generic Object argument, yet it is usually a semantic error to seek to equate a Cat with anything other than another Cat. In practice, programmers compare like with like, but they can only do this by type downcasting the argument of the equals method, forcibly overriding the natural type system.


A different but related problem arises when recursively-typed methods are inherited and invoked in a subtype object. So far, we have not modelled the notion of inheritance in any detail, but let us invent a simple rule to create subtypes by record extension [2]. Since records are merely maps from labels to values, and maps are really just sets, we can combine records using set union. Let us assume that we wish to define a hierarchy of numeric types, and that the basic Number type provides a primitive notion of addition:

after unrolling the recursion. We can seek to derive other numeric types by extending this, yielding for example the Natural, Integer, Real and Complex numbers. In particular, the Integer type offers a full range of arithmetical methods:

This defines the Integer type by extending the Number type with a record of additional fields, and then fixing the recursion. After unrolling Number to yield the corresponding record type, we can compute the union of fields, yielding the recursive record type:

after unrolling the Integer recursion. Curiously, while the locally declared methods are all typed in terms of Integer, the inherited plus method is already fixed in terms of Number. As a consequence, the intuitively reasonable arithmetic expression:

fails even to typecheck! This is because the sub-expression returns a result of the general type Number, for which the minus method is not defined. This is the problem of type-loss under inheritance, something with which Java and C++ programmers will be familiar. It arises because the type recursion in Number fixes the signature of the plus method, and this more general type is still retained in Integer, after the union of fields. In practice, Java and C++ programmers have to use type downcasting to override the natural type system, if they wish expressions like this to compile, something like:

Type downcasting is typically considered a last resort, a dirty trick to be used on occasions when the natural type system doesn't help. Here, we have shown how type downcasting has to be used systematically all the time to overcome deficiencies in the type system. This is a strong indicator that subtyping is not the most appropriate formal model for object-oriented languages. Instead, we need a more expressive type system.


Working backwards from the desired goal, it seems that our intuitive notion of classification requires a type system in which recursive types can have methods that are closed over their own type, but which are nonetheless related to each other in some systematic way. We want to be able to support families of related types that behave in similar ways, such as the numeric types which all provide addition:

and somehow be able to assert that these all belong to the class of numbers. There is clearly a systematic pattern here, in which all related numeric types . We can get close to this idea with universal quantification:

which says that “all types .” This is still not quite right, since we want plus to be defined only for the numeric types, not for absolutely every type.

Universal quantification was adopted independently by Girard [4] and Reynolds [5] as a way of introducing type parameters, variables which range over types (ie which receive types as their bound value). They are used in the second-order -calculus, in which functions can accept both value- and type-arguments. This was found useful to express the notion of polymorphism, describing functions that work uniformly on families of types. Parametric polymorphism was built into the early functional programming languages ML and Hope, and exists in object-oriented languages as the templates in C++, or generic types in Ada and Eiffel. Before we can understand the usefulness of type parameters in modelling polymorphism, we need to explain the idea of different orders of calculus, and understand something of how to construct and simplify expressions.


A zero-order system has no variables, but only sets of values. A first-order system has functions, whose bound variables range over simple values. A second-order system has functions, whose bound variables range over both values and simple types. The -calculus is the identity function, which accepts an argument and returns it unchanged:

Recall that "x.x to anything, such as integers, characters or even other functions (in which case we would have a higher-order system).

We may attach simple types to the function's arguments in the simply-typed -calculus. This is a first-order system, since simply-typed variables can only range over basic values. If we so wish, we can restrict the identity function to accept only Integer values:

The difference here is that the types of the formal argument and the actual value must match, otherwise the application is deemed illegal, a type error. We can say that this identity is a monomorphic function, since it is defined only for a single type, Integer. We say that identity has the type: Integer Integer.

In the second-order is a type parameter:

Identity now expects a type argument: , since it applies to any type and returns a result of the same type.


This kind of construction can be used to extend our formal model of object types and allows us to define polymorphic types (generic, or templated types). Let us start with a monomorphic recursive record type for an IntegerStack:

As before, * is a recursive placeholder for the eventual IntegerStack. We may modify this definition to create a polymorphic type if we replace occurrences of Integer by a type parameter. We must introduce the parameter at the head of the type definition:


and the result we obtain is identical to the IntegerStack type from above, after substituting {Integer/} in the record body. This is interesting, because we may apply Stack to any type we fancy, such as Stack[Character] or Stack[Boolean], creating specific instantiations of the polymorphic type. There is no restriction on the actual element type we could supply, so this kind of polymorphism is sometimes known as universal polymorphism. We can express the polymorphic types of individual methods using universal quantification:

which we read as: "for all types ", and similarly for the other methods. Clearly, the generic Stack type expresses something about a family of related Stack-types, but this is still not the notion of class that we are seeking to capture.


It was Cook [6, 7] who first realised that in order to model a class as a polymorphic family of related types, the key lay in making the self-type flexible, so that it could refer to a different actual type in every member of the type family. In an earlier article [1] we introduced type generators for recursive types, in which the self-type eventually stands for the whole type, not for a part of it.

Type generators can be used, exactly like type functions above, to create different instantiated versions of a parameterised record type. To see how this works, we revisit the Number type, but this time express it as a type generator, in which the self-type is not recursively fixed, but is a parameter introduced by :

GenNumber is a generator for a family of related record types which have the general structure of numbers with a plus method. To show this, we can apply GenNumber to other numeric types, and this has the effect of adapting the self-type *, which is substituted by whatever type-argument we supply:

This looks promising, in that we are able to construct record types with a plus method that is uniformly specialised to specific numeric types. We shall use this adaptive ability below.

The ideal type for an Integer is a recursive type whose methods are all closed over its own type, which we can unroll to a record type expressed in terms of Integers:

Although this type can never be a subtype of the recursive Number type from section 3 above (because it uniformly specialises plus : Number Integer), it is nonetheless a subtype of a specially adapted GenNumber generator, that is:

which we can demonstrate by unrolling Integer to a record (on the left-hand side) and then evaluating GenNumber[Integer] (on the right-hand side) and comparing the two records:

This satisfies the record subtyping rule [2]. The left-hand side contains more fields than the right-hand side, a simple case of record extension. It turns out that all the other numeric types (with more methods than Number) can be shown to enter into a similar relationship with a suitably-adapted version of the generator, for example:

and it follows intuitively that any type satisfying: <: GenNumber[] belongs to the family of numeric types which share at least the plus-method. From this, Cook realised that a class is a polymorphic family of types that satisfy a constraint, or bound [6, 7], expressed using a generator function. Whereas universal quantification introduces type parameters that range over any type, Cook's function-bounded quantification introduces type parameters that only range over a restricted group of types which satisfy the constraint. The whole class of numbers can be expressed formally as the type family:

meaning "all those types which are subtyes of the adapted GenNumber generator". What is unusual about this special kind of quantification is that the parameter appears on both sides of the <: subtyping constraint; but it turns out that this is exactly what is necessary to express the notion of a family of recursively closed types that have a shared minimum structure.

A suitable polymorphic type for the plus method may now be given, by restricting the family of types to those in the class of numbers:

The constraint ] is known as a function bound, or F-bound for short. F-bounded quantification was a revolutionary discovery, because it captured exactly the kind of polymorphism present in object-oriented languages, in which methods apply to families of types sharing a minimum common structure.


We have formally defined the notion of class, using Cook's F-bounded quantification to express the idea that a class is a family of types that share a minimum common structure. This is a radical departure from the earlier view that a programmer's class corresponds to a simple type. Although the languages Java and C++ adopt this simpler view, we found that there were sufficient reasons to challenge this view, particularly the evidence from the frequent use of type downcasting needed to overcome inadequacies of first-order type systems based on types and subtyping. We are moving towards a second-order type system, in which a programmer's class really corresponds to a polymorphic type. We showed how polymorphism is modelled systematically using type parameters, and explained the relationship between universal quantification, which supports the definition of generic types, and F-bounded quantification, which supports the definition of classes:

and even satisfies natural intuitions about biological classification in which animals reproduce their own kind. Mathematics, as someone once said, is pure poetry.



[2] A J H Simons, “The theory of classification, part 4: Object types and subtyping”, in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 1, no. 5, November-Decembe 2002, pp. 27-35.

[3] A J H Simons, “The theory of classification, part 5: Axioms, assertions and subtyping”, in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 2, no. 1, January-February, pp. 13-21.

[4] J-Y Girard, “Interpretation fonctionelle et elimination des coupures de l'arithmetique d'ordre superieur”, PhD Thesis, Universite Paris VII, 1972.

[5] J Reynolds, “Towards a theory of type structure”, Proc. Coll. Prog., New York, LNCS 19 (Springer Verlag, 1974), 408-425.

[6] W Cook, “A denotational semantics of inheritance”, PhD Thesis, Brown University, 1989.


About the author


Cite this article as follows: Anthony J.H. Simons: “The Theory of Classification. Part 7: A Class is a Type Family”, in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 2, no. 3, May-June 2003, pp. 13-22.