Functional programming
Functional programming languages often allow the subtyping of records. Consequently, simply typed lambda calculus extended with record types is perhaps the simplest theoretical setting in which a useful notion of subtyping may be defined and studied. Because the resulting calculus allows terms to have more than one type, it is no longer a "simple" type theory. Since functional programming languages, by definition, support function literals, which can also be stored in records, records types with subtyping provide some of the features of object-oriented programming. Typically, functional programming languages also provide some, usually restricted, form of parametric polymorphism. In a theoretical setting, it is desirable to study the interaction of the two features; a common theoretical setting is system F&lt;:. Various calculi that attempt to capture the theoretical properties of object-oriented programming may be derived from system F&lt;:.