A statically safe alternative to virtual types Kim B. Bruce, Williams College Martin Odersky, University of South Australia Philip Wadler, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies Parametric types and virtual types have recently been proposed as extensions to Java to support genericity. In this paper we examine both in order to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of each. We suggest a variant of virtual types which has similar expressiveness, but supports safe static type checking. This results in a language in which both parametric types and virtual types are well-integrated, and which is statically type-safe.