Are there programming languages that allow you to do set arithmetic on types?

Posted by Will Brown on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Will Brown
Published on 2012-11-21T00:29:03Z Indexed on 2012/11/21 5:20 UTC
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Out of curiosity, are there languages that allow you to do set arithmetic on types to create new types? Something like:

interface A {
  void a();
  void b();
}

interface B {
  void b();
  void c();
}

interface C = A & B; // has b()
interface D = A | B; // has a(), b() and c()
interface E = (A & B) ^ B; // has c()

I know that in some languages these ideas can be expressed (i.e., Java has List<Comparable & Serializable> for the union of the interfaces) but I've never heard of a language that supports type arithmetic. Thanks!

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