The C++0x "Concepts" Effort

C++0x is the working title for the revision of the ISO standard of the C++ programming language that was originally planned for release in 2009 but that was delayed to 2011. The largest language extension in C++0x was "concepts", that is, a collection of features for constraining template parameters. In September of 2008, the C++ standards committee voted the concepts extension into C++0x, but then in July of 2009, the committee voted the concepts extension back out of C++0x. This article is my account of the technical challenges and debates within the "concepts" effort in the years 2003 to 2009. To provide some background, the article also describes the design space for constrained parametric polymorphism, or what is colloquially know as constrained generics. While this article is meant to be generally accessible, the writing is aimed toward readers with background in functional programming and programming language theory. This article grew out of a lecture at the Spring School on Generic and Indexed Programming at the University of Oxford, March 2010

Failure in welfare partnerships – a gender hypothesis: reflections on a serendipity pattern in Local Safeguarding Children Boards

This article examines the roles that occupational segregation and gender bias in the welfare professions play in persistent failures in inter-agency and inter-professional collaborations. Drawing on case study evidence from a Local Safeguarding Children Board in England, a ‘serendipity pattern’ of gender dominance is identified within professions affecting inter-professional collaborations such as those prevalent in Local Safeguarding Children Boards. As we assign this pattern ‘strategic interpretation’, we suggest that policy measures taken to augment the effectiveness of welfare partnerships have, so far, paid insufficient attention to the critical variable of gender, due to over-emphasis on the organisations, rather than the professions, involved. The article’s contribution to practice is unravelling the potential of this oversight to contribute to failure to establish a collaborative mind-set. Our contribution to theory is highlighting specific cultural barriers to inter-professional collaborations, unravelling the power differentials rooted in gender inequity in public sector workforces and challenging professional and organizational traditionalism. In doing so, we offer empirical evidence of the ‘gender hypothesis’ in welfare partnerships and indicate how future investigations might be pursued in this area

Featherweight VeriFast

VeriFast is a leading research prototype tool for the sound modular verification of safety and correctness properties of single-threaded and multithreaded C and Java programs. It has been used as a vehicle for exploration and validation of novel program verification techniques and for industrial case studies; it has served well at a number of program verification competitions; and it has been used for teaching by multiple teachers independent of the authors. However, until now, while VeriFast's operation has been described informally in a number of publications, and specific verification techniques have been formalized, a clear and precise exposition of how VeriFast works has not yet appeared. In this article we present for the first time a formal definition and soundness proof of a core subset of the VeriFast program verification approach. The exposition aims to be both accessible and rigorous: the text is based on lecture notes for a graduate course on program verification, and it is backed by an executable machine-readable definition and machine-checked soundness proof in Coq