1,385 research outputs found
Bounded Refinement Types
We present a notion of bounded quantification for refinement types and show
how it expands the expressiveness of refinement typing by using it to develop
typed combinators for: (1) relational algebra and safe database access, (2)
Floyd-Hoare logic within a state transformer monad equipped with combinators
for branching and looping, and (3) using the above to implement a refined IO
monad that tracks capabilities and resource usage. This leap in expressiveness
comes via a translation to "ghost" functions, which lets us retain the
automated and decidable SMT based checking and inference that makes refinement
typing effective in practice.Comment: 14 pages, International Conference on Functional Programming, ICFP
201
Declarative Policies for Capability Control
In capability-safe languages, components can access a resource only if they possess a capability for that resource. As a result, a programmer can prevent an untrusted component from accessing a sensitive resource by ensuring that the component never acquires the corresponding capability. In order to reason about which components may use a sensitive resource it is necessary to reason about how capabilities propagate through a system. This may be difficult, or, in the case of dynamically composed code, impossible to do before running the system. To counter this situation, we propose extensions to capability-safe languages that restrict the use of capabilities according to declarative policies. We introduce two independently useful semantic security policies to regulate capabilities and describe language-based mechanisms that enforce them. Access control policies restrict which components may use a capability and are enforced using higher-order contracts. Integrity policies restrict which components may influence (directly or indirectly) the use of a capability and are enforced using an information-flow type system. Finally, we describe how programmers can dynamically and soundly combine components that enforce access control or integrity policies with components that enforce different policies or even no policy at all.Engineering and Applied Science
Session Types in Concurrent Calculi: Higher-Order Processes and Objects
This dissertation investigates different formalisms, in the form of programming language calculi,
that are aimed at providing a theoretical foundation for structured concurrent programming based
on session types. The structure of a session type is essentially a process-algebraic style description
of the behaviour of a single program identifier serving as a communication medium (and usually
referred to as a channel): the types incorporate typed inputs, outputs, and choices which can be
composed to form larger protocol descriptions. The effectiveness of session typing can be attributed
to the linear treatment of channels and session types, and to the use of tractable methods
such as syntactic duality to decide if the types of two connected channels are compatible. Linearity
is ensured when accumulating the uses of a channel into a composite type that describes also
the order of those actions. Duality provides a tractable and intuitive method for deciding when
two connected channels can interact and exchange values in a statically determined type-safe way.
We present our contributions to the theory of sessions, distilled into two families of programming
calculi, the first based on higher-order processes and the second based on objects. Our work unifies,
improves and extends, in manifold ways, the session primitives and typing systems for the
Lambda-calculus, the Pi-calculus, the Object-calculus, and their combinations in multi-paradigm
languages. Of particular interest are: the treatment of infinite interactions expressed with recursive
sessions; the capacity to encapsulate channels in higher-order structures which can be exchanged
and kept suspended, i.e., the use of code as data; the integration of protocol structure directly
into the description of objects, providing a powerful and uniformly extensible set of implementation
abstractions; finally, the introduction of asynchronous subtyping, which enables controlled
reordering of actions on either side of a session. Our work on higher-order processes and on object
calculi for session-based concurrent programming provides a theoretical foundation for programming
language design integrating functional, process, and object-oriented features
An Implementation of the Language Lambda Prolog Organized around Higher-Order Pattern Unification
This thesis concerns the implementation of Lambda Prolog, a higher-order
logic programming language that supports the lambda-tree syntax approach to
representing and manipulating formal syntactic objects. Lambda Prolog achieves
its functionality by extending a Prolog-like language by using typed lambda
terms as data structures that it then manipulates via higher-order unification
and some new program-level abstraction mechanisms. These additional features
raise new implementation questions that must be adequately addressed for Lambda
Prolog to be an effective programming tool. We consider these questions here,
providing eventually a virtual machine and compilation based realization. A key
idea is the orientation of the computation model of Lambda Prolog around a
restricted version of higher-order unification with nice algorithmic properties
and appearing to encompass most interesting applications. Our virtual machine
embeds a treatment of this form of unification within the structure of the
Warren Abstract Machine that is used in traditional Prolog implementations.
Along the way, we treat various auxiliary issues such as the low-level
representation of lambda terms, the implementation of reduction on such terms
and the optimized processing of types in computation. We also develop an actual
implementation of Lambda Prolog called Teyjus Version 2. A characteristic of
this system is that it realizes an emulator for the virtual machine in the C
language a compiler in the OCaml language. We present a treatment of the
software issues that arise from this kind of mixing of languages within one
system and we discuss issues relevant to the portability of our virtual machine
emulator across arbitrary architectures. Finally, we assess the the efficacy of
our various design ideas through experiments carried out using the system
- …