Proceedings of the Workshop on Algorithmic Aspects of Advanced Programming Languages: WAAAPL'99: Paris, France, September 30, 1999

The first Workshop on Algorithmic Aspects of Advanced Programming Languages was held on September 30, 1999, in Paris, France, in conjunction with the PLI'99 conferences and workshops. The choice of programming languages has a huge effect on the algorithms and data structures that are to be implemented in that language. Traditionally, algorithms and data structures have been studied in the context of imperative languages. This workshop considers the algorithmic implications of choosing an advanced functional or logic programming language instead. A total of eight papers were selected for presentation at the workshop, together with an invited lecture by Robert Harper. We would like to thank Dider Remv, general chair of PLI'99, for his assistance in organizing this workshop

The gender specification and cultural sensitivity of depression research with Black Americans: A multidimensional model

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64287/1/Watkins_Johnson2008.pd

A Programming System for End-user Functional Programming

This research involves the construction of a programming system, HASKEU, to support end-user programming in a purely functional programming language. An end-user programmer is someone who may program a computer to get their job done, but has no interest in becoming a computer programmer. A purely functional programming language is one that does not require the expression of statement sequencing or variable updating. The end-user is offered two views of their functional program. The primary view is a visual one, in which the program is presented as a collection of boxes (representing processes) and lines (representing data flow). The secondary view is a textual one, in which the program is presented as a collection of written function definitions. It is expected that the end-user programmer will begin with the visual view, perhaps later moving on to the textual view. The task of the programming system is to ensure that the visual and textual views are kept consistent as the program is constructed. The foundation of the programming system is a implementation of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern as a reactive program using the elegant Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) framework. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) principles and methods are considered in all design decisions. A usabilty study was made to find out the effectiveness of the new system

The educational experiences of the deaf adolescents attending a school for the deaf in Gauteng.

This study aimed to describe the educational experiences of deaf adolescent learners attending a school for the deaf in South Africa. The specific objectives of the current study included: (a) obtaining a detailed description of the educational experiences of deaf adolescent learners; (b) establishing with which rhetoric (medical vs. cultural) the deaf adolescents could best identify; (c) establishing the potential influence on individual identity development of the established affiliations with the opposing models of deafness. Ten deaf adolescents ranging between 14 and 16 years, attending a single school for the deaf were selected as participants for the current study. A basic research design and a qualitative approach, embedded within the theory of social constructivism were employed. Two pilot studies were conducted in order to establish the feasibility of the current study. Thereafter, interviews as per the ‘interview guide approach’ were administered. Field observations within the school context and file reviews were also conducted. Thematic content analysis was employed and the identified themes were described qualitatively. Results revealed the emergence of three themes. Within these themes, the adolescents’ experiences included: limited SASL role models both at home and at school, negative educational encounters as well as positivity and hope for the future. Experiences characteristic of the medical model and socio-cultural model of deafness were reported and factors affecting these affiliations were described. The researcher concluded that a level of affiliation with both the medical and the sociocultural models of deafness existed for the participants. The impact of these affiliations on identity construction was explored and a model of identity development, the multiculturalexperience model, was proposed. The education of deaf individuals in South Africa shows room for significant growth. By adjusting government education policies for deaf education as well as supporting the goals of early intervention, deaf learners can reach their full potential regardless of the mode of communication favoured

A Language-Independent Static Checking System for Coding Conventions

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Despite decades of research aiming to ameliorate the difficulties of creating software, programming still remains an error-prone task. Much work in Computer Science deals with the problem of specification, or writing the right program, rather than the complementary problem of implementation, or writing the program right. However, many desirable software properties (such as portability) are obtained via adherence to coding standards, and therefore fall outside the remit of formal specification and automatic verification. Moreover, code inspections and manual detection of standards violations are time consuming. To address these issues, this thesis describes Exstatic, a novel framework for the static detection of coding standards violations. Unlike many other static checkers Exstatic can be used to examine code in a variety of languages, including program code, in-line documentation, markup languages and so on. This means that checkable coding standards adhered to by a particular project or institution can be handled by a single tool. Consequently, a major challenge in the design of Exstatic has been to invent a way of representing code from a variety of source languages. Therefore, this thesis describes ICODE, which is an intermediate language suitable for representing code from a number of different programming paradigms. To substantiate the claim that ICODE is a universal intermediate language, a proof strategy has been developed: for a number of different programming paradigms (imperative, declarative, etc.), a proof is constructed to show that semantics-preserving translation exists from an exemplar language (such as IMP or PCF) to ICODE. The usefulness of Exstatic has been demonstrated by the implementation of a number of static analysers for different languages. This includes a checker for technical documentation written in Javadoc which validates documents against the Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) Coding Conventions and a checker for HTML pages against a site-specifc standard. A third system is targeted at a variant of the Python language, written by the author, called python-csp, based on Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes

Session Types in Concurrent Calculi: Higher-Order Processes and Objects

This dissertation investigates different formalisms, in the form of programming language calculi, that are aimed at providing a theoretical foundation for structured concurrent programming based on session types. The structure of a session type is essentially a process-algebraic style description of the behaviour of a single program identifier serving as a communication medium (and usually referred to as a channel): the types incorporate typed inputs, outputs, and choices which can be composed to form larger protocol descriptions. The effectiveness of session typing can be attributed to the linear treatment of channels and session types, and to the use of tractable methods such as syntactic duality to decide if the types of two connected channels are compatible. Linearity is ensured when accumulating the uses of a channel into a composite type that describes also the order of those actions. Duality provides a tractable and intuitive method for deciding when two connected channels can interact and exchange values in a statically determined type-safe way. We present our contributions to the theory of sessions, distilled into two families of programming calculi, the first based on higher-order processes and the second based on objects. Our work unifies, improves and extends, in manifold ways, the session primitives and typing systems for the Lambda-calculus, the Pi-calculus, the Object-calculus, and their combinations in multi-paradigm languages. Of particular interest are: the treatment of infinite interactions expressed with recursive sessions; the capacity to encapsulate channels in higher-order structures which can be exchanged and kept suspended, i.e., the use of code as data; the integration of protocol structure directly into the description of objects, providing a powerful and uniformly extensible set of implementation abstractions; finally, the introduction of asynchronous subtyping, which enables controlled reordering of actions on either side of a session. Our work on higher-order processes and on object calculi for session-based concurrent programming provides a theoretical foundation for programming language design integrating functional, process, and object-oriented features