Annotated Type Systems for Program Analysis

In this Ph.D. thesis, we study four program analyses. Three of them are specified by annotated type systems and the last one by abstract interpretation.We present a combined strictness and totality analysis. We are specifying the analysis as an annotated type system. The type system allows conjunctions of annotated types, but only at the top-level. The analysis is somewhat more powerful than the strictness analysis by Kuo and Mishra due to the conjunctions and in that we also consider totality. The analysis is shown sound with respect to a natural-style operational semantics. The analysis is not immediately extendable to full conjunction.The second analysis is also a combined strictness and totality analysis, however with ``full´´ conjunction. Soundness of the analysis is shown with respect to a denotational semantics. The analysis is more powerful than the strictness analyses by Jensen and Benton in that it in addition to strictness considers totality. So far we have only specified the analyses, however in order for the analyses to be practically useful we need an algorithm for inferring the annotated types. We construct an algorithm for the second analysis using the lazy type approach by Hankin and Le Métayer. The reason for choosing the second analysis from the thesis is that the approach is not applicable to the first analysis.The third analysis we study is a binding time analysis. We take the analysis specified by Nielson and Nielson and we construct a more efficient algorithm than the one proposed by Nielson and Nielson. The algorithm collects constraints in a structural manner like the type inference algorithm by Damas. Afterwards the minimal solution to the set of constraints is found.The last analysis in the thesis is specified by abstract interpretation. Hunt shows that projection based analyses are subsumed by PER (partial equivalence relation) based analyses using abstract interpretation. The PERs used by Hunt are strict, i.e. bottom is related to bottom. Here we lift this restriction by requiring the PERs to be uniform, in the sense that they treat all the integers equally. By allowing non-strict PERs we get three properties on the integers, corresponding to the three annotations used in the first and second analysis in the thesis

Cell morphing: from array programs to array-free Horn clauses

International audienceAutomatically verifying safety properties of programs is hard.Many approaches exist for verifying programs operating on Boolean and integer values (e.g. abstract interpretation, counterexample-guided abstraction refinement using interpolants), but transposing them to array properties has been fraught with difficulties.Our work addresses that issue with a powerful and flexible abstractionthat morphes concrete array cells into a finite set of abstractones. This abstraction is parametric both in precision and in theback-end analysis used.From our programs with arrays, we generate nonlinear Horn clauses overscalar variables only, in a common format with clear and unambiguouslogical semantics, for which there exist several solvers. We thusavoid the use of solvers operating over arrays, which are still veryimmature.Experiments with our prototype VAPHOR show that this approach can proveautomatically and without user annotationsthe functional correctness of several classical examples, including \emph{selection sort}, \emph{bubble sort}, \emph{insertion sort}, as well as examples from literature on array analysis

Ravel the Existentialist?

Both during his lifetime, and throughout the years since, audiences of Maurice Ravel’s music have reported several uncanny sensations that scholars have found difficult to explain using traditional modes of musical analysis. Listeners tend to experience a sense of detachment or distance permeating Ravel’s works, as if the composer is intentionally setting up an emotional barrier between himself, the performer, and the audience. Scholars agree that these qualities mirror the composer’s personality and lifestyle, drawing comparison between such traits as his emotionally guarded social comportment and his dandyist sense of style, and the particular sounds and textures of his compositions. However, scholars differ in their presumptions about what underlying principles govern these “Ravel phenomena,” offering up a variety of psychological, aesthetic, and literary contexts as possible ways of seeing “behind the veil” of Ravel’s characteristic artifice. In Chapter One, I examine two of the most recent major books about Ravel, Stephen Zank’s Irony and Sound and Michael J. Puri’s Ravel the Decadent, exploring how each writer’s core theory illuminates the connection between Ravel as he composed and Ravel as he lived. In Chapter Two, using the Valses nobles et sentimentales as a case study, I observe how these theories are expressed in an actual piano composition, both alongside and independently of more traditional music theory. Chapter Three presents my own proposed conceptual context for surveying Ravel, in which I argue that many Ravel phenomena exhibit and anticipate the existentialist principles that would be outlined by Jean-Paul Sartre only several years after the composer’s death. By comparing Sartre’s seminal texts of existentialism (Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism) with Ravel’s own comments on his process of composition, his attitude in social interactions, and his manner of dress and home décor, I demonstrate that Ravel possessed proto-existentialist senses of artistic process, of the nature of the self, and of the fraught relationship between the interior self and the gaze of the Other. Lastly, I conclude in Chapter Four with a discussion for performers, especially concerning the performance of Ravel’s piano music. Here I draw on the work of Carolyn Abbate, whose exploration of “musical automatons” as an influence on Ravel provides further connection to Sartre, who identifies performative, mechanistic behaviors as an inherent part of human existence

Strategic Gendering: The Negotiated Social Actions of Adolescent Girls

This qualitative study is focused on how gender expectations shape the identities and social actions of seven white middle class adolescent girls. Utilizing an ethnographically oriented grounded theory approach, this study seeks to reframe adolescent girls’ agentic actions in relation to cultural influences. This investigation looks at “cultural impasses” in girls’ lives and how they are indicators of gendered preconditions which shape their everyday choices and behaviors. Research aims are embedded in the concept that gender is socially constructed and produced through the combined interplay of girls’ social actions and cultural demands. Through an examination of girl and adult narratives, elicited texts, and ethnographic research, as well as, the analytic frameworks of pragmatism and critical feminism, this study maps out a range of social actions that are sometimes contradictory in nature. “Strategic gendering” is proposed as a way to illuminate the observable blending of opposing social actions of girls in this study, who strive to satisfy dual commitments to self and culture. Strategic gendering refers to an adaptive negotiation of social actions that simultaneously links girls’ personal goals with cultural expectations and can be evidenced in girls’ day to day behaviors. This concept can be understood through theories of power, gender, autonomy, and agency which are considered in relation to study participants’ life experiences. Further, this study explores implications of findings for white middle class girls, parents, teachers and other professionals who live and work with them

Raw Life, New Hope

The Cape Flats, a windswept, barren and sandy area which rings Cape Town, is home to more than a million people. Many live here in sprawling shack settlements. The post-apartheid state is attempting to eradicate such settlements by providing formal houses in planned residential estates. Raw Life, New Hope is a longitudinal study of the residents of one such shack settlement, The Park, who moved to new, 'formal' houses in The Village, at the turn of the millennium. It introduces readers to core social science topics and modes of theorising. Over 17 years the author has traced how ordinary people attempt to live in accord with their ideals of decency under almost impossible circumstances, and the effects of material changes in their lives after 1994, including the provision of housing. Photos, maps, anecdotes, recipes and philosophical reflections on subjects that arose during conversations elicit a sense of the everyday and of how people try to solve the problems of poverty

Ways of Living: An Ethical Realism in the Prose of Gottfried Keller

My dissertation, Ways of Living: An Ethical Realism in the Prose of Gottfried Keller, takes as its focus the extensive discourse in mid-nineteenth century German letters on what constitutes a properly “realist” work of literature. My study examines three major works by Gottfried Keller: Der grüne Heinrich, the Leute von Seldwyla cycle, and the political satire Martin Salander. I consider these prose works as a response firstly to the call by critics like Julian Schmidt and Gustav Freytag for a return to das Reale, as they called it, and secondly to the contemporaneous developments in the French and English novel. Keller, I argue, is less interested in offering a comprehensive social portrait of his native Switzerland than he is in exploring contrasting ethics, or modes of disposition towards the world: resentment and affirmation, parsimoniousness and wastefulness, sensuality and renunciation. To this end, Keller uses the familiar structures of Realist prose, like the construction of characters as types, the extensive description of physical objects, or the use of narrative topoi like the marriage plot, to dramatize conflicts between various Lebensarten: self-sacrifice in service of an unattainable ideal or fleeting happiness in the here and now, for example. For Keller, then, the “objectivity” championed by the Realists is above all a way of directing the reader’s attention towards the crises of value underpinning the most unremarkable of people and the most mundane of occupations. In Keller’s prose, I conclude, Realism is less an aesthetic program than a way of comporting oneself, a survival mechanism by means of which the hard truths of life, above all the vanity of human endeavor and the painful renunciations demanded by the world of work, are poeticized in order to make them bearable

Raw Life, New Hope

The Cape Flats, a windswept, barren and sandy area which rings Cape Town, is home to more than a million people. Many live here in sprawling shack settlements. The post-apartheid state is attempting to eradicate such settlements by providing formal houses in planned residential estates. Raw Life, New Hope is a longitudinal study of the residents of one such shack settlement, The Park, who moved to new, 'formal' houses in The Village, at the turn of the millennium. It introduces readers to core social science topics and modes of theorising. Over 17 years the author has traced how ordinary people attempt to live in accord with their ideals of decency under almost impossible circumstances, and the effects of material changes in their lives after 1994, including the provision of housing. Photos, maps, anecdotes, recipes and philosophical reflections on subjects that arose during conversations elicit a sense of the everyday and of how people try to solve the problems of poverty