107,008 research outputs found
Graceful Language Extensions and Interfaces
Grace is a programming language under development aimed at education. Grace is object-oriented, imperative, and block-structured, and intended for use in first- and second-year object-oriented programming courses. We present a number of language features we have designed for Grace and implemented in our self-hosted compiler. We describe the design of a pattern-matching system with object-oriented structure and minimal extension to the language. We give a design for an object-based module system, which we use to build dialects, a means of extending and restricting the language available to the programmer, and of implementing domain-specific languages. We show a visual programming interface that melds visual editing (à la Scratch) with textual editing, and that uses our dialect system, and we give the results of a user experiment we performed to evaluate the usability of our interface
A Syntactic Model of Mutation and Aliasing
Traditionally, semantic models of imperative languages use an auxiliary
structure which mimics memory. In this way, ownership and other encapsulation
properties need to be reconstructed from the graph structure of such global
memory. We present an alternative "syntactic" model where memory is encoded as
part of the program rather than as a separate resource. This means that
execution can be modelled by just rewriting source code terms, as in semantic
models for functional programs. Formally, this is achieved by the block
construct, introducing local variable declarations, which play the role of
memory when their initializing expressions have been evaluated. In this way, we
obtain a language semantics which directly represents at the syntactic level
constraints on aliasing, allowing simpler reasoning about related properties.
To illustrate this advantage, we consider the issue, widely studied in the
literature, of characterizing an isolated portion of memory, which cannot be
reached through external references. In the syntactic model, closed block
values, called "capsules", provide a simple representation of isolated portions
of memory, and capsules can be safely moved to another location in the memory,
without introducing sharing, by means of "affine' variables. We prove that the
syntactic model can be encoded in the conventional one, hence efficiently
implemented.Comment: In Proceedings DCM 2018 and ITRS 2018 , arXiv:1904.0956
Efficient and Reasonable Object-Oriented Concurrency
Making threaded programs safe and easy to reason about is one of the chief
difficulties in modern programming. This work provides an efficient execution
model for SCOOP, a concurrency approach that provides not only data race
freedom but also pre/postcondition reasoning guarantees between threads. The
extensions we propose influence both the underlying semantics to increase the
amount of concurrent execution that is possible, exclude certain classes of
deadlocks, and enable greater performance. These extensions are used as the
basis an efficient runtime and optimization pass that improve performance 15x
over a baseline implementation. This new implementation of SCOOP is also 2x
faster than other well-known safe concurrent languages. The measurements are
based on both coordination-intensive and data-manipulation-intensive benchmarks
designed to offer a mixture of workloads.Comment: Proceedings of the 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software
Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of
Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE '15). ACM, 201
Component-based simulation for a reconfiguration study of transitic systems
This paper is organized as follows. Part A presents the context of reconfiguring transitic systems and the main idea in implementing the decision step. It comprises sections 1 to 3. Section 3 presents an example that illustrates the concepts presented in the next sections. Parts B and C express the models and principles used to simulate transitic systems, the result of which will be helpful for choosing the new configuration. Part B focuses mainly on models. It comprises sections 4 to 6. Part C focuses mainly on simulation principles. It comprises sections 7 to 10
Test Case Generation for Object-Oriented Imperative Languages in CLP
Testing is a vital part of the software development process. Test Case
Generation (TCG) is the process of automatically generating a collection of
test cases which are applied to a system under test. White-box TCG is usually
performed by means of symbolic execution, i.e., instead of executing the
program on normal values (e.g., numbers), the program is executed on symbolic
values representing arbitrary values. When dealing with an object-oriented (OO)
imperative language, symbolic execution becomes challenging as, among other
things, it must be able to backtrack, complex heap-allocated data structures
should be created during the TCG process and features like inheritance, virtual
invocations and exceptions have to be taken into account. Due to its inherent
symbolic execution mechanism, we pursue in this paper that Constraint Logic
Programming (CLP) has a promising unexploited application field in TCG. We will
support our claim by developing a fully CLP-based framework to TCG of an OO
imperative language, and by assessing it on a corresponding implementation on a
set of challenging Java programs. A unique characteristic of our approach is
that it handles all language features using only CLP and without the need of
developing specific constraint operators (e.g., to model the heap)
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