2,614 research outputs found
The Sketch of a Polymorphic Symphony
In previous work, we have introduced functional strategies, that is,
first-class generic functions that can traverse into terms of any type while
mixing uniform and type-specific behaviour. In the present paper, we give a
detailed description of one particular Haskell-based model of functional
strategies. This model is characterised as follows. Firstly, we employ
first-class polymorphism as a form of second-order polymorphism as for the mere
types of functional strategies. Secondly, we use an encoding scheme of run-time
type case for mixing uniform and type-specific behaviour. Thirdly, we base all
traversal on a fundamental combinator for folding over constructor
applications.
Using this model, we capture common strategic traversal schemes in a highly
parameterised style. We study two original forms of parameterisation. Firstly,
we design parameters for the specific control-flow, data-flow and traversal
characteristics of more concrete traversal schemes. Secondly, we use
overloading to postpone commitment to a specific type scheme of traversal. The
resulting portfolio of traversal schemes can be regarded as a challenging
benchmark for setups for typed generic programming.
The way we develop the model and the suite of traversal schemes, it becomes
clear that parameterised + typed strategic programming is best viewed as a
potent combination of certain bits of parametric, intensional, polytypic, and
ad-hoc polymorphism
Strategic polymorphism requires just two combinators!
In previous work, we introduced the notion of functional strategies:
first-class generic functions that can traverse terms of any type while mixing
uniform and type-specific behaviour. Functional strategies transpose the notion
of term rewriting strategies (with coverage of traversal) to the functional
programming paradigm. Meanwhile, a number of Haskell-based models and
combinator suites were proposed to support generic programming with functional
strategies.
In the present paper, we provide a compact and matured reconstruction of
functional strategies. We capture strategic polymorphism by just two primitive
combinators. This is done without commitment to a specific functional language.
We analyse the design space for implementational models of functional
strategies. For completeness, we also provide an operational reference model
for implementing functional strategies (in Haskell). We demonstrate the
generality of our approach by reconstructing representative fragments of the
Strafunski library for functional strategies.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper was presented at IFL 2002, and
included in the informal preproceedings of the worksho
Typed Generic Traversal With Term Rewriting Strategies
A typed model of strategic term rewriting is developed. The key innovation is
that generic traversal is covered. To this end, we define a typed rewriting
calculus S'_{gamma}. The calculus employs a many-sorted type system extended by
designated generic strategy types gamma. We consider two generic strategy
types, namely the types of type-preserving and type-unifying strategies.
S'_{gamma} offers traversal combinators to construct traversals or schemes
thereof from many-sorted and generic strategies. The traversal combinators
model different forms of one-step traversal, that is, they process the
immediate subterms of a given term without anticipating any scheme of recursion
into terms. To inhabit generic types, we need to add a fundamental combinator
to lift a many-sorted strategy to a generic type gamma. This step is called
strategy extension. The semantics of the corresponding combinator states that s
is only applied if the type of the term at hand fits, otherwise the extended
strategy fails. This approach dictates that the semantics of strategy
application must be type-dependent to a certain extent. Typed strategic term
rewriting with coverage of generic term traversal is a simple but expressive
model of generic programming. It has applications in program transformation and
program analysis.Comment: 85 pages, submitted for publication to the Journal of Logic and
Algebraic Programmin
Faithful (meta-)encodings of programmable strategies into term rewriting systems
Rewriting is a formalism widely used in computer science and mathematical
logic. When using rewriting as a programming or modeling paradigm, the rewrite
rules describe the transformations one wants to operate and rewriting
strategies are used to con- trol their application. The operational semantics
of these strategies are generally accepted and approaches for analyzing the
termination of specific strategies have been studied. We propose in this paper
a generic encoding of classic control and traversal strategies used in rewrite
based languages such as Maude, Stratego and Tom into a plain term rewriting
system. The encoding is proven sound and complete and, as a direct consequence,
estab- lished termination methods used for term rewriting systems can be
applied to analyze the termination of strategy controlled term rewriting
systems. We show that the encoding of strategies into term rewriting systems
can be easily adapted to handle many-sorted signa- tures and we use a
meta-level representation of terms to reduce the size of the encodings. The
corresponding implementation in Tom generates term rewriting systems compatible
with the syntax of termination tools such as AProVE and TTT2, tools which
turned out to be very effective in (dis)proving the termination of the
generated term rewriting systems. The approach can also be seen as a generic
strategy compiler which can be integrated into languages providing pattern
matching primitives; experiments in Tom show that applying our encoding leads
to performances comparable to the native Tom strategies
Strategic polymorphism requires just two combinators!
In previous work, we introduced the notion of functional strategies: first-class generic functions that can traverse terms of any type while mixing uniform and type-specific behaviour. Functional strategies transpose the notion of term rewriting strategies (with coverage of traversal) to the functional programming paradigm. Meanwhile, a number of Haskell-based models and combinator suites were proposed to support generic programming with functional strategies. In the present paper, we provide a compact and matured reconstruction of functional strategies. We capture strategic polymorphism by just two primitive combinators. This is done without commitment to a specific functional language. We analyse the design space for implementational models of functional strategies. For completeness, we also provide an operational reference model for implementing functional strategies (in Haskell). We demonstrate the generality of our approach by reconstructing representative fragments of the Strafunski library for functional strategies
A Framework for Datatype Transformation
We study one dimension in program evolution, namely the evolution of the
datatype declarations in a program. To this end, a suite of basic
transformation operators is designed. We cover structure-preserving
refactorings, but also structure-extending and -reducing adaptations. Both the
object programs that are subject to datatype transformations, and the meta
programs that encode datatype transformations are functional programs.Comment: Minor revision; now accepted at LDTA 200
Programming errors in traversal programs over structured data
Traversal strategies \'a la Stratego (also \'a la Strafunski and 'Scrap Your
Boilerplate') provide an exceptionally versatile and uniform means of querying
and transforming deeply nested and heterogeneously structured data including
terms in functional programming and rewriting, objects in OO programming, and
XML documents in XML programming. However, the resulting traversal programs are
prone to programming errors. We are specifically concerned with errors that go
beyond conservative type errors; examples we examine include divergent
traversals, prematurely terminated traversals, and traversals with dead code.
Based on an inventory of possible programming errors we explore options of
static typing and static analysis so that some categories of errors can be
avoided. This exploration generates suggestions for improvements to strategy
libraries as well as their underlying programming languages. Haskell is used
for illustrations and specifications with sufficient explanations to make the
presentation comprehensible to the non-specialist. The overall ideas are
language-agnostic and they are summarized accordingly
Scrap your boilerplate with object algebras
htmlabstractTraversing complex Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) typically requires large amounts of tedious boilerplate code. For many operations most of the code simply walks the structure, and only a small portion of the code implements the functional- ity that motivated the traversal in the first place. This paper presents a type-safe Java framework called Shy that removes much of this boilerplate code. In Shy Object Algebras are used to describe complex and extensible AST structures. Using Java annotations Shy generates generic boilerplate code for various types of traversals. For a concrete traversal, users of Shy can then inherit from the generated code and over- ride only the interesting cases. Consequently, the amount of code that users need to write is significantly smaller. Moreover, traversals using the Shy framework are also much more structure shy, becoming more adaptive to future changes or extensions to the AST structure. To prove the effectiveness of the approach, we applied Shy in the implementation of a domain-specific questionnaire language. Our results show that for a large number of traversals there was a significant reduction in the amount of user-defined code
- …