parametric polymorphism

noun

parametric polymorphism

noun

Etymology Coined by British computer scientist Christopher Strachey in 1967.

1

Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Programming, Sciences Usually A way to make a computer language more expressive, while maintaining full static type safety, by allowing a function or a data type to be written generically so that it can handle values identically without depending on their type.

Related terms
generic programming, Hindley-Milner type system

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.