Towards equal rights for higher-kinded types
Adriaan Moors, Frank Piessens, Martin Odersky · 2007
Generics are a very popular feature of contemporary OO languages, such as Java, C # or Scala. Their support for genericity is lacking, however. The problem is that they only support abstracting over proper types, and not over generic types. This limitation makes it impossible to, e.g., define a precise interface for Iterable, a core abstraction in Scala’s collection API. We implemented “type constructor polymorphism” in Scala 2.5, which solves this problem at the root, thus greatly reducing the duplication of type signatures and code.