I think this is a type system limitation that every type describing side effects -- i.e. the core of every interesting program other than a compiler/interpreter -- can only be used in the context of a compiler/interpreter.
Checker (Java 8's pluggable intersection type-system framework) is able to do that (define side-effect types), but isn't a single general type system. I.e. you need to write a different type system for each property (of course, they can all work together). Maybe that's the only known way to do that. Searching for more general solutions, I've come up empty handed (the problem is well known, but the solutions are all in early stages of research).
The idea of such a type system needs to be something like: each function has a set of types associated with it, and a function's type interacts with the types of the functions it calls in some ways. So the most primitive example is, of course, checked exceptions, where the type of a function is a simple union of the types of its callees. But the interactions can, and should be more interesting, and take into account the order in which the callees are called etc.
I'm sorry, I don't think I understand your message and my answer might be off as a result. Could you link to the current research on more general solutions than Checker, so I can get a clearer picture?
> a type system limitation that every type describing side effects [...] can only be used in the context of a compiler/interpreter.
A type system is just a logic description of a property that a program might have. It specifies how the language constructs interact with this property []. The fact that compilers use a type system is independent of your ability to write your custom type system, or to use it in a different context (IDE, toolchain, ..).
[] Are you saying that a type system shouldn't be concerned by the AST of the language?
Also, I don't understand why you distinguish "typing side effects" as something different from the rest?
> you need to write a different type system for each property
But you do have to define your type system at some point?
Are you thinking of something like Mezzo, where some userland properties can be defined without going down the type-system-definition road? https://protz.github.io/mezzo/
> But the interactions can, and should be more interesting, and take into account the order in which the callees are called etc.
That's why type systems are defined with respect to the language construct, by rules on the AST (? I'm confused because of the earlier [*] here).
To go back to Agda significance for a custom type system, it's not enough to define a type system. You generally want to prove that your definition is valid: If your "checked exceptions" says that a program `P` can't fail due to an exception, you want to check that you didn't forget anything by verifying the type checker with respect to the actual semantic of the language.
You can also embed your custom property into Agda type system (isn't that what you want?).
I am not a type theory expert (or even enthusiast) by any means, but I imagine something that will be very useful like so: the intersection types of callees interact in interesting ways with the type of the caller (taking into account ordering). For example, the type of the caller can be: "this function locks A, then B, then unlocks B, then unlocks A". This type can arbitrarily intersect other effect types, such as: "this function writes to socket X" and also "mutates variable V".
I will be able to define a type "locks A" and "locks B", and the kind "locks" will be ordered, so that the type of a function that locks A and locks B, will be "locks A and then locks B". Also, I will be able to define interactions between types so that unlocking A will undo the effect, so that a function that simple locks A will have the type "locks A", but one that locks and later unlocks will have the type "holds A". Of course, these types intersect arbitrarily.
> I think this is a type system limitation that every type describing side effects -- i.e. the core of every interesting program other than a compiler/interpreter -- can only be used in the context of a compiler/interpreter.
Well, to describe a side effect, you need to, uh, describe the side effect. Which requires understanding the compiler/interpreter, and a description of the things the compiler/interpreter does, expressed as machine-readable data.
It sounds like what you're after is something like a standard library where all the effects are carefully enumerated? i.e. something like Haskell, but where rather than the IO "sin bin", every effectful function would be very explicit about its effects? A bit like how Ada(IIRC) shipped with quite high-level concurrency operations as part of the language spec (which then lead users to reimplement low-level concurrency primitives on top of them, but maybe we can hope that history wouldn't repeat)?
Some libraries are taking us in that direction, but it's slow going. E.g. doobie seems to be gaining some momentum, as a principled way of expressing database access. Maybe in 10 years' time (if anyone is still using scala...) this will be "the" standard way of writing any program that uses a database, and the sort of thing that deserves to be in the standard library (whatever that means - IMO with modern dependency management tools a language standard library should only contain those primitives that need direct compiler support, anything else can be a regular library. But that's a whole 'nother argument). But right now it would be very premature to say that the algebra doobie uses is the correct one. Often the appropriate interpreter for a particular problem depends on that particular problem; just as it's good to construct your datatypes bottom-up, writing a program can feel like writing a succession of interpreters that get closer to your domain and capture more of the laws - basic Haskell gives you "thing that does any kind of I/O", then you have a library for "thing that sends complete messages to sockets", a higher-level library on top of that for "thing that does database operations", and so on.
And honestly standardization isn't that important, as long as the language makes it easy to let your code handle it generically. Doobie itself allows a couple of different implementations for your lower-level effect-capturing monad (scalaz Task, IO), or allows you to provide a simple adapter. So if two libraries use the equivalent of a different checker, a different "type system", that's not really any worse than e.g. two C++ libraries using two different String classes - that is to say, it's annoying, but not impossible to work with. User-level code can do the same thing - I've got a generic "report" process that can use a doobie database call, an async call to a web service, or something else. As and when the community reaches a consensus on the right way to express a particular kind of effect, I'd expect more higher-level libraries to standardize on that. But in the meantime, as long as types are first-class values and you can manipulate them as easy as any other values (which these kind of languages get you), multiple "type systems" are no more of a problem to work with than multiple types.
I'm not talking about standardization but about a different kind of type system, where the intersection types of callees interact in interesting ways with the type of the caller[1] (taking into account ordering). From what I understand this kind of thing is being research but we don't have anything close to being practical just yet.
[1]: for example, the type of the caller can be: "this function locks A, then B, then unlocks B, then unlocks A". This type can arbitrarily intersect other effect types, such as: "this function writes to socket X" and also "mutates variable V"
> I'm not talking about standardization but about a different kind of type system, where the intersection types of callees interact in interesting ways with the type of the caller[1] (taking into account ordering). From what I understand this kind of thing is being research but we don't have anything close to being practical just yet.
Isn't chriswarbo's example that? Since your Ops are generic they can be other effect types. The interleaving is the tricky part, but e.g. Haskell's extensible-effects is practical enough that it's used in real programs.
Checker (Java 8's pluggable intersection type-system framework) is able to do that (define side-effect types), but isn't a single general type system. I.e. you need to write a different type system for each property (of course, they can all work together). Maybe that's the only known way to do that. Searching for more general solutions, I've come up empty handed (the problem is well known, but the solutions are all in early stages of research).
The idea of such a type system needs to be something like: each function has a set of types associated with it, and a function's type interacts with the types of the functions it calls in some ways. So the most primitive example is, of course, checked exceptions, where the type of a function is a simple union of the types of its callees. But the interactions can, and should be more interesting, and take into account the order in which the callees are called etc.