In Racket, programmers can create powerful abstractions by bundling together a family of values, functions, and syntax extensions in the form of a new language. These languages, however, are typically untyped. Turnstile is a new Racket {library,language} for creating typed languages by integrating type checking with Racket’s existing tools for describing languages. The technique is described by fellow PRL’ers in the paper Type Systems as Macros.

Racket encourages language developers to take full advantage of linguistic reuse by defining new language forms in terms of existing constructs. Unsurprisingly, language extensions often retain some of the Racket-y flavor from the underlying constructs. Implementors save time and energy while users of the language benefit from the familiarity they already have with the Racket ecosystem.

Unfortunately, Turnstile does not lend itself to expressing one of Racket’s most ubiquitous idioms: naming local bindings with define. Early experience reports from Turnstile, including my own, suggest that language implementors very much desire to include define-like binding forms in their languages.

This blog post provides a brief overview of what Turnstile is and how it works, an introduction to defining typed language forms, and how to equip these languages with a define binding form.