Imperative LF Meta-Programming

AbstractLogical frameworks have enjoyed wide adoption as meta-languages for describing deductive systems. While the techniques for representing object languages in logical frameworks are relatively well understood, languages and techniques for meta-programming with them are much less so. This paper presents work in progress on a programming language called Rogue-Sigma-Pi (RSP), in which general programs can be written for soundly manipulating objects represented in the Edinburgh Logical Framework (LF). The manipulation is sound in the sense that, in the absence of runtime errors, any putative LF object produced by a well-typed RSP program is guaranteed to type check in LF. An important contribution is an approach for soundly combining imperative features with higher-order abstract syntax. The focus of the paper is on demonstrating RSP through representative LF meta-programs

Acute: high-level programming language design for distributed computation

Existing languages provide good support for typeful programming of standalone programs. In a distributed system, however, there may be interaction between multiple instances of many distinct programs, sharing some (but not necessarily all) of their module structure, and with some instances rebuilt with new versions of certain modules as time goes on. In this paper we discuss programming language support for such systems, focussing on their typing and naming issues. We describe an experimental language, Acute, which extends an ML core to support distributed development, deployment, and execution, allowing type-safe interaction between separately-built programs. The main features are: (1) type-safe marshalling of arbitrary values; (2) type names that are generated (freshly and by hashing) to ensure that type equality tests suffice to protect the invariants of abstract types, across the entire distributed system; (3) expression-level names generated to ensure that name equality tests suffice for type-safety of associated values, e.g. values carried on named channels; (4) controlled dynamic rebinding of marshalled values to local resources; and (5) thunkification of threads and mutexes to support computation mobility. These features are a large part of what is needed for typeful distributed programming. They are a relatively lightweight extension of ML, should be efficiently implementable, and are expressive enough to enable a wide variety of distributed infrastructure layers to be written as simple library code above the byte-string network and persistent store APIs. This disentangles the language runtime from communication intricacies. This paper highlights the main design choices in Acute. It is supported by a full language definition (of typing, compilation, and operational semantics), by a prototype implementation, and by example distribution libraries

Rigid Mixin Modules

International audienceMixin modules are a notion of modules that allows cross-module recursion and late binding, two features missing in ML-style modules. They have been well defined in a call-by-name setting, but in a call-by-value setting, they tend to conflict with the usual static restrictions on recursive definitions. Moreover, the semantics of instantiation has to specify an order of evaluation, which involves a difficult design choice. Previous proposals rely on the dependencies between components to compute a valid order of evaluation. In such systems, mixin module types must carry some information on the dependencies between their components, which makes them verbose. In this paper, we propose a new, simpler design for mixin modules in a call-by-value setting, which avoids this problem

Introduction to the Literature On Programming Language Design

This is an introduction to the literature on programming language design and related topics. It is intended to cite the most important work, and to provide a place for students to start a literature search

Dependent Object Types

We propose a new type-theoretic foundation of Scala and languages like it: the Dependent Object Types (DOT) calculus. DOT models Scala’s path-dependent types, abstract type members and its mixture of nominal and structural typing through the use of refinement types. The core formalism makes no attempt to model inheritance and mixin composition. DOT normalizes Scala’s type system by unifying the constructs for type members and by providing classical intersection and union types which simplify greatest lower bound and least upper bound computations. In this paper, we present the DOT calculus, both formally and informally. We also discuss our work-in-progress to prove typesafety of the calculus