A primitive calculus for module systems

We present a simple and powerful calculus of modules supporting mutual recursion and higher order features. The calculus allows to encode a large variety of existing mechanisms for combining software components, including parameterized modules, extension with overriding of object-oriented programming, mixin modules and extra-linguistic mechanisms like those provided by a linker. As usual, we first present an untyped version of our calculus and then a type system which is proved sound w.r.t. the reduction semantics; moreover we give a translation of other primitive calculi.