262 research outputs found
An overview of the ciao multiparadigm language and program development environment and its design philosophy
We describe some of the novel aspects and motivations behind
the design and implementation of the Ciao multiparadigm programming system. An important aspect of Ciao is that it provides the programmer with a large number of useful features from different programming paradigms and styles, and that the use of each of these features can be turned on and off at will for each program module. Thus, a given module may be using e.g. higher order functions and constraints, while another module may be using objects, predicates, and concurrency. Furthermore, the language is designed to be extensible in a simple and modular way. Another important aspect of Ciao is its programming environment, which provides a powerful preprocessor (with an associated assertion language) capable of statically finding non-trivial bugs, verifying that programs comply with specifications, and performing many types of program optimizations. Such optimizations produce code that is highly competitive with other dynamic languages or, when the highest levéis of optimization are used, even that of static languages, all while retaining the interactive development environment of a dynamic language. The environment also includes a powerful auto-documenter. The paper provides an informal overview of the language and program development environment. It aims at illustrating the design philosophy rather than at being exhaustive, which would be impossible in the format of a paper, pointing instead to the existing literature on the system
The CIAO Multi-Dialect Compiler and System: An Experimentation Workbench for Future (C)LP Systems
CIAO is an advanced programming environment supporting Logic and Constraint programming. It offers a simple concurrent kernel on top of which declarative and non-declarative extensions are added via librarles. Librarles are available for supporting the ISOProlog standard, several constraint domains, functional and higher order programming, concurrent and distributed programming, internet programming, and others. The source language allows declaring properties of predicates via assertions, including types and modes. Such properties are checked at compile-time or at run-time. The compiler and system architecture are designed to natively support modular global analysis, with the two objectives of proving properties in assertions and performing program optimizations, including transparently exploiting parallelism in programs. The purpose of this paper is to report on recent progress made in the context of the CIAO system, with special emphasis on the capabilities of the compiler, the techniques used for supporting such capabilities, and the results in the áreas of program analysis and transformation already obtained with the system
Proceedings of the Resolve Workshop 2006
The aim of the RESOLVE Workshop 2006 was to bring together researchers and educators interested in: Refining formal approaches to software engineering, especially component-based systems, and introducing them into the classroom. The workshop served as a forum for participants to present and discuss recent advances, trends, and concerns in these areas, as well as formulate a common understanding of emerging research issues and possible solution paths
An overview of ciao and its design philosophy
We provide an overall description of the Ciao multiparadigm programming system emphasizing some of the novel aspects and motivations behind its design and implementation. An important aspect of Ciao is that, in addition to supporting logic programming (and, in particular, Prolog), it provides the programmer with a large number of useful features from different programming paradigms and styles and that the use of each of these features (including those of Prolog) can be turned on and off at will for each program module. Thus,
a given module may be using, e.g., higher order functions and constraints, while another module may be using assignment, predicates, Prolog meta-programming, and concurrency. Furthermore, the language is designed to be extensible in a simple and modular way. Another important aspect of Ciao is its programming environment, which provides a powerful preprocessor (with an associated assertion language) capable of statically finding non-trivial bugs, verifying that programs comply with specifications, and performing many types of optimizations (including automatic parallelization). Such optimizations produce code that is highly competitive with other dynamic languages or, with the (experimental) optimizing compiler, even that of static languages, all while retaining the flexibility and interactive development of a dynamic language. This compilation architecture supports modularity and separate compilation throughout. The environment also includes a powerful autodocumenter and a unit testing framework, both closely integrated with the assertion system. The paper provides an informal overview of the language and program development environment. It aims at illustrating the design philosophy rather than at being exhaustive, which would be impossible in a single journal paper, pointing instead to previous Ciao literature
Towards high-level execution primitives for and-parallelism: preliminary results
Most implementations of parallel logic programming rely on complex low-level machinery which is arguably difflcult to implement and modify. We explore an alternative approach aimed at taming that complexity by raising core parts of the implementation to the source language level for the particular case of and-parallelism. Therefore, we handle a signiflcant portion of the parallel implementation mechanism at the Prolog level with the help of a comparatively small number of concurrency-related primitives which take care of lower-level tasks such as locking, thread management, stack set management, etc. The approach does not eliminate altogether modiflcations to the abstract machine, but it does greatly simplify them and it also facilitates experimenting with different alternatives. We show how this approach allows implementing both restricted and unrestricted (i.e., non fork-join) parallelism. Preliminary experiments show that the amount of performance sacriflced is reasonable, although granularity control is required in some cases. Also, we observe that the availability of unrestricted parallelism contributes to better observed speedups
Towards a High-Level Implementation of Execution Primitives for Unrestricted, Independent And-Parallelism
Most efficient implementations of parallel logic programming rely on complex low-level machinery which is arguably difficult to implement and modify. We explore an alternative approach aimed at taming that complexity by raising core parts of the implementation to the source language level for the particular case of and-parallellism. We handle a significant portion of the parallel implementation at the Prolog level with the help of a comparatively small number of concurrency.related primitives which take case of lower-level tasks such as locking, thread management, stack set management, etc. The approach does not eliminate altogether modifications to the abstract machine, but it does greatly simplify them and it also facilitates experimenting with different alternatives. We show how this approach allows implementing both restricted and unrestricted (i.e., non fork-join) parallelism. Preliminary esperiments show thay the performance safcrifieced is reasonable, although granularity of unrestricted parallelism contributes to better observed speedups
C++ exam methodology
The C++ programming language supports multiparadigm programming.
We can write programs in procedural, object-oriented, generic way at the
same time.
However, it is difficult to figure out exercises for the terminal examinations
since not easy to separate the algorithmic cogitation from the knowledge of
the programming language. There are some basic elements that programmer
students have to know: constructors, parameter passing, objects, inheritance,
standard library, handling constants, copying objects, functions and member
functions, etc. Exercises must be multiparadigm according to the C++ language.
Using only one paradigm in C++ is not enough. This results in that
we have to distinguish the different linguistic constructs on the basis of its
complexity.
Many questions are arisen in connection with the exercises of terminal
examinations. How can we gauge the procedural, the object-oriented, and
the generic paradigms at the same time? How can we gauge students’ C++
knowledge when we do not lay stress on the algorithmic cogitation? What
kind of exercises may be interesting by the Standard Template Library?
Which C++ constructs are reckoned to be more difficult and which ones
considered to be easier? What are the most important ones? In this paper
we give answers to the previous questions, we describe our methodology to
assessment of students’ C++ knowledge in a semi-automatic grading way. We
also present exercise examples that worked out according to our methodology.
We take stock of students’ results in the paper
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