Dex: array programming with typed indices

Dougal Maclaurin, Alexey Radul, Matthew J. Johnson, and Dimitrios Vytiniotis

Keywords: Array programming, functional programming

TL;DR: Introducing a functional array processing language

Abstract: Array programming is harder than it should be. Major pain points are managing bulk operations on high-rank arrays, and the associated shape and indexing errors. We describe Dex, a functional array processing language in the Haskell/ML family. Dex introduces a lightweight looping construct and a type system that captures common patterns of array shapes. We hope the language ideas we present here can influence the design of existing array programming systems.