A Theory of Type Polymorphism in Programming (Milner, 1978)
Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-10-31 digest. Area: Programming Languages. Author: Robin Milner (University of Edinburgh) Published: Journal of Computer and System Sciences 17(3), December 1978, pp. 348–375. DOI: 10.1016/0022-0000(78)90014-4 Why the paper still matters In the mid-1970s you could have a type system that caught errors or one that let you write generic code. Pascal and Algol 68 were checked but monomorphic, so a list-reversal function had to be written once per element type....