Effects, capabilities, and boxes: from scope-based reasoning to type-based reasoning and back
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reasoning about the use of external resources is an important aspect of many practical applications. Effect systems enable tracking such information in types, but at the cost of complicating signatures of common functions. Capabilities coupled with escape analysis offer safety and natural signatures, but are often overly coarse grained and restrictive. We present System C, which builds on and generalizes ideas from type-based escape analysis and demonstrates that capabilities and effects can be reconciled harmoniously. By assuming that all functions are second class, we can admit natural signatures for many common programs. By introducing a notion of boxed values, we can lift the restrictions of second-class values at the cost of needing to track degree-of-impurity information in types. The system we present is expressive enough to support effect handlers in full capacity. We practically evaluate System C in an implementation and prove its soundness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it