May 3-6, 2015 Asilomar, California

A Complement to Blame

Philip Wadler

Contracts, gradual typing, and hybrid typing all permit less-precisely typed and more-precisely typed code to interact. Blame calculus encompasses these, and guarantees blame safety: blame for type errors always lays with less-precisely typed code. This paper serves as a complement to the literature on blame calculus: it elaborates on motivation, comments on the reception of the work, critiques some work for not properly attending to blame, and looks forward to applications. No knowledge of contracts, gradual typing, hybrid typing, or blame calculus is assumed.