On the construction of persistent programming environments

This thesis presents research into the construction of persistent programming systems. Much of the thesis is concerned with the design and implementation of persistent programming languages, in particular PS-algol and Napier. Both languages support machine independent vector and raster graphics data types. Napier provides an environment mechanism that enables the incremental construction and binding of programs. Napier has a powerful type system featuring parametric polymorphism and abstract data types. The machine supporting Napier, the Persistent Abstract Machine, is investigated. The machine supports an efficient implementation of parametric polymorphism and abstract data types. The Persistent Abstract Machine has a layered architecture in which permits experimentation into language implementation and store design. The construction of compilers in a persistent environment is explored. A flexible compiler architecture is developed. With it, a family of compilers may be constructed at relatively little cost. One such compiler is the callable compiler; this is a first class data object in the persistent environment. The uses of such a compiler are explored, in particular in the construction of an object browser. The persistent object browser introduces a new software architecture that permits adaptive programs to be constructed incrementally. This is achieved by writing, compiling and linking new procedures into an executing program. The architecture has been successfully applied to the construction of adaptive databases and bootstrap compilers

An Architecture for the Compilation of Persistent Polymorphic Reflective Higher-Order Languages

Persistent Application Systems are potentially very large and long-lived application systems which use information technology: computers, communications, networks, software and databases. They are vital to the organisations that depend on them and have to be adaptable to organisational and technological changes and evolvable without serious interruption of service. Persistent Programming Languages are a promising technology that facilitate the task of incrementally building and maintaining persistent application systems. This thesis identifies a number of technical challenges in making persistent programming languages scalable, with adequate performance and sufficient longevity and in amortising costs by providing general services. A new architecture to support the compilation of long-lived, large-scale applications is proposed. This architecture comprises an intermediate language to be used by front-ends, high-level and machine independent optimisers, low-level optimisers and code generators of target machine code. The intermediate target language, TPL, has been designed to allow compiler writers to utilise common technology for several different orthogonally persistent higher-order reflective languages. The goal is to reuse optimisation and code-generation or interpretation technology with a variety of front-ends. A subsidiary goal is to provide an experimental framework for those investigating optimisation and code generation. TPL has a simple, clean type system and will support orthogonally persistent, reflective, higher-order, polymorphic languages. TPL allows code generation and the abstraction over details of the underlying software and hardware layers. An experiment to build a prototype of the proposed architecture was designed, developed and evaluated. The experimental work includes a language processor and examples of its use are presented in this dissertation. The design space was covered by describing the implications of the goals of supporting the class of languages anticipated while ensuring long-term persistence of data and programs, and sufficient efficiency. For each of the goals, the design decisions were evaluated in face of the results

Models of higher-order, type-safe, distributed computation over autonomous persistent object stores

A remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism permits the calling of procedures in another address space. RPC is a simple but highly effective mechanism for interprocess communication and enjoys nowadays a great popularity as a tool for building distributed applications. This popularity is partly a result of their overall simplicity but also partly a consequence of more than 20 years of research in transpaxent distribution that have failed to deliver systems that meet the expectations of real-world application programmers. During the same 20 years, persistent systems have proved their suitability for building complex database applications by seamlessly integrating features traditionally found in database management systems into the programming language itself. Some research. effort has been invested on distributed persistent systems, but the outcomes commonly suffer from the same problems found with transparent distribution. In this thesis I claim that a higher-order persistent RPC is useful for building distributed persistent applications. The proposed mechanism is: realistic in the sense that it uses current technology and tolerates partial failures; understandable by application programmers; and general to support the development of many classes of distributed persistent applications. In order to demonstrate the validity of these claims, I propose and have implemented three models for distributed higher-order computation over autonomous persistent stores. Each model has successively exposed new problems which have then been overcome by the next model. Together, the three models provide a general yet simple higher-order persistent RPC that is able to operate in realistic environments with partial failures. The real strength of this thesis is the demonstration of realism and simplicity. A higherorder persistent RPC was not only implemented but also used by programmers without experience of programming distributed applications. Furthermore, a distributed persistent application has been built using these models which would not have been feasible with a traditional (non-persistent) programming language

Object Management for Persistence and Recoverability

PhD ThesisAs distribution becomes commonplace, there is a growing requirement for applications that behave reliably when node or network failures occur. To support reliability, operations on the components of a distributed application may be declared to occur within the scope of an atomic action. This thesis describes how atomic actions may be supported in an environment consisting of applications that operate on objects. To support the failure atomicity and permanence of effect properties of an atomic action, the objects accessed within the scope of an atomic action must be recoverable and persistent. This thesis describes how these properties may be added to the class of an object. The approach adopted is to provide a class that implements recovery and persistence mechanisms, and derive new classes from this base class. By refining inherited operations so that recovery and persistence is specific to that class, recoverable and persistent objects may be easily produced. This thesis also describes how an atomic action may be implemented as a class, so that instances of the class are atomic actions which manage the recoverable and persistent objects. Multiple instance declarations produce nested atomic actions, and the atomic action class also inherits persistence so that shortterm commit information may be saved in an object store which is used to maintain the passive state of persistent objects. Since the mechanisms and classes that support recovery, persistence, and atomic actions are constructed using the feature of an object-oriented language, they may be implemented in environments that provide suitable support for objects and object-oriented programming languages.Science and Engineering Research Council, SERC/Alve

Ecological Approaches to Modernism, the U.S. South, and 20th Century American Literature

This project seeks to draw from the insights of the emerging scholarly discipline known as ecocritism, study of the relationship between human and nonhuman in all arts and in all diverse forms, and apply them to the study of a specific regional art, that of the U.S. South. As an interrogation of the human / nonhuman binary, ecocriticism is intrinsically intertwined with the concept of place. Southern studies—having long explored the diversity (in terms of both human experience and geographical terrain) characterizing the region—offers ecocriticism a ripe testing ground for theoretical mergers and analytic applications. Both fields celebrate hybridity, multiplicity, and variegation. This project, in keeping with this argumentative mandate, analyzes a number of separate primary texts in a variety of formats. Each of these narratives features a palpable, vibrantly realized setting. In most cases, the text’s evocation of its integral setting becomes accessible to the reader or viewer primarily through the perceptions, words, and sentiments of a child protagonist. The characters in these texts and films operate outside of larger southern, national, and global societies, participating instead in insular communal or familial systems. Each relies upon an intimate connection to animal life for spiritual, personal, and or directly physical sustenance. Further, these texts, viewed and read as a collective, demonstrate a preoccupation with the nonhuman running through various genres, modes, and time periods of southern narrative. These preoccupations illustrate the potentials for literature and film to shed light upon the relevance of posthumanist outlooks towards biological systems and geographical methodologies and ecological paradigms of place and its nonhuman or more-than-human dimensions. Further, each of these young protagonists, as his or her respective narrative progresses, discover the previously enjoyed intimacy of their connection with the land to be endangered by modernity, capitalism, and similar threats to both natural landscapes and human lifestyles. The project of decentering the human underlying ecocriticism and ecocinema, in the context of southern studies, enters a pre-existing conversation uniquely suited to encompass challenges to age-old binaries and hegemonies

Prophylactic Fictions: Immunity And Biosecurity

Prophylactic Fictions traces a prehistory for what I term inoculation insecurity, by which I mean a constellation of political and cultural anxieties surrounding the legitimacy, safety, and efficacy of a developing medical procedure used to preserve the health of its subject in advance of infection. I read a collection of pamphlets, poetry, plays, essays, and novels that witness the evolution of this procedure from early eighteenth-century variolation (inoculation by smallpox matter) to late eighteenth-century vaccination (inoculation by cowpox matter). The culture wars inaugurated by Edward Jenner’s revolution of preventative medicine through vaccination grappled with the right of the government and the medical establishment to literally puncture the bodies of citizens on the grounds that England was “threatened,” be it by French radicalism or by foreign bodies and objects crossing English borders. Bringing this rich archive to bear on readings of canonical novels like Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Bram Stoker’s Dracula resituates them at the locus of intense debates about the persistently insecure relationship between the body (individual and social) and the state. Attention to the transitions in the co-constituent domains of medicine and literature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals that inoculation’s preventative function has never been purely a biological issue. At stake were not only the changes in medical technology and practice but also the professionalization and institutionalization of medicine itself. My project recalibrates the axes by which we tend to narrate the history of medicine: vaccine skepticism was not simply a refusal of medical innovation but a direct challenge to the state’s cooptation and misuse of medicine in the name of “national security.” Can and should the state be able to monitor, regulate, or even make compulsory health interventions based purely on the need to prevent imagined threats? Literary and cultural production in this period captures the conflicting ways in which health threats were imagined and secured

Constituting theatricality: the social negotiation of dramatic performance

This thesis promotes a consideration of theatre as an essentially social skill rather than a dramatic one. It argues that theatre is dependent for its very existence on the social context and the available representational grammars which are firmly grounded in that context. It examines the theatrical experience through field work and a number of interviews with those involved in that experience. It considers the author and the basis and extent of his authority; the director and his perceived part in the production process; the history of criticism and the critics' current role; the actor and his relationship with the audience for whom he plays, and the ways in which the particular style of participation in performance is negotiated both at an acceptedly "theatrical" occasion and a situation where the definition of performance is pushed to its limits. It proposes that the study of theatricality, much hindered by the persistent and now cliched metaphor of life as theatre, is the study of sociality itself. The institution of theatricality is a set of patterned norms for representing social experience and this makes its study peculiarly pertinent to a sociological approach. It suggests that dramatic performance is the use of general interpretive modes for a particular reason, that being precisely to highlight that society consists of just such ways of being together

Environments of Intelligence

What is the role of the environment, and of the information it provides, in cognition? More specifically, may there be a role for certain artefacts to play in this context? These are questions that motivate "4E" theories of cognition (as being embodied, embedded, extended, enactive). In his take on that family of views, Hajo Greif first defends and refines a concept of information as primarily natural, environmentally embedded in character, which had been eclipsed by information-processing views of cognition. He continues with an inquiry into the cognitive bearing of some artefacts that are sometimes referred to as 'intelligent environments'. Without necessarily having much to do with Artificial Intelligence, such artefacts may ultimately modify our informational environments. With respect to human cognition, the most notable effect of digital computers is not that they might be able, or become able, to think but that they alter the way we perceive, think and act. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY licenc