A Second Look at Overloading

Martin Odersky, Philip Wadler, Martin Wehr

Proc. FPCA'95, 
ACM Conference on Functional Programming and Computer Architecture

We study a minimal extension of the Hindley/Milner system that
supports overloading and polymorphic records. We show that the type
system is sound with respect to a standard untyped compositional
semantics. We also show that every typable term in this system has a
principal type and give an algorithm to reconstruct that type.