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

MORTAL - Multiparadigm Optimizing Retargetable Transdisciplinary Abstraction Language

This short paper describes MORTAL, a new general-purpose programming language and compiler for high-performance scientific applications. MORTAL aims to bridge the knowledge gap between computer scientists and scientists by offering a multiparadigm programming environment that allows connecting the mathematical formulae written by scientist to algorithms implemented by the software engineer in a natural way, and understood by both. We provide the rationale for MORTAL, give an overview of the language design and the MORTAL compiler. The compiler is self-hosting, and our initial evaluation shows that MORTAL programs have similar performance as C programs

Language Interaction and Quality Issues: An Exploratory Study

Most software systems are complex and often composed of a large number of artifacts. To realize each different artifacts specific techniques are used resorting on different abstractions, languages and tools. Successful composition of different elements requires coherence among them. Unfortunately constraints between artifacts written in different languages are usually not formally expressed neither checked by supporting tools; as consequence they can be a source of problems. In this paper we explore the role of the relations between artifacts written in different languages by means of a case study on the Hadoop open source project. We present the problem introducing the related terminology, we quantify the phenomenon and investigate the relation with defect pronenes

Why Ciao? An overview of the ciao system's design philosophy

Our intention in this note is not to provide a listing of the many features of the Ciao system: this can be found in part for example in the brochures announcing upcoming versions, in the Ciao website, or in more feature-oriented descriptions such as. Instead in this document we would like to describe the objectives and reasoning followed in our design as well as the fundamental characteristics that in our opinion make Ciao quite unique and hopefully really useful to you as a Ciao user