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BioScript: programming safe chemistry on laboratories-on-a-chip
This paper introduces BioScript, a domain-specific language (DSL) for programmable biochemistry which executes on emerging microfluidic platforms. The goal of this research is to provide a simple, intuitive, and type-safe DSL that is accessible to life science practitioners. The novel feature of the language is its syntax, which aims to optimize human readability; the technical contributions of the paper include the BioScript type system and relevant portions of its compiler. The type system ensures that certain types of errors, specific to biochemistry, do not occur, including the interaction of chemicals that may be unsafe. The compiler includes novel optimizations that place biochemical operations to execute concurrently on a spatial 2D array platform on the granularity of a control flow graph, as opposed to individual basic blocks. Results are obtained using both a cycle-accurate microfluidic simulator and a software interface to a real-world platform
In the Age of Web: Typed Functional-First Programming Revisited
Most programming languages were designed before the age of web. This matters
because the web changes many assumptions that typed functional language
designers take for granted. For example, programs do not run in a closed world,
but must instead interact with (changing and likely unreliable) services and
data sources, communication is often asynchronous or event-driven, and programs
need to interoperate with untyped environments.
In this paper, we present how the F# language and libraries face the
challenges posed by the web. Technically, this comprises using type providers
for integration with external information sources and for integration with
untyped programming environments, using lightweight meta-programming for
targeting JavaScript and computation expressions for writing asynchronous code.
In this inquiry, the holistic perspective is more important than each of the
features in isolation. We use a practical case study as a starting point and
look at how F# language and libraries approach the challenges posed by the web.
The specific lessons learned are perhaps less interesting than our attempt to
uncover hidden assumptions that no longer hold in the age of web.Comment: In Proceedings ML/OCaml 2014, arXiv:1512.0143
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
Beyond Good and Evil: Formalizing the Security Guarantees of Compartmentalizing Compilation
Compartmentalization is good security-engineering practice. By breaking a
large software system into mutually distrustful components that run with
minimal privileges, restricting their interactions to conform to well-defined
interfaces, we can limit the damage caused by low-level attacks such as
control-flow hijacking. When used to defend against such attacks,
compartmentalization is often implemented cooperatively by a compiler and a
low-level compartmentalization mechanism. However, the formal guarantees
provided by such compartmentalizing compilation have seen surprisingly little
investigation.
We propose a new security property, secure compartmentalizing compilation
(SCC), that formally characterizes the guarantees provided by
compartmentalizing compilation and clarifies its attacker model. We reconstruct
our property by starting from the well-established notion of fully abstract
compilation, then identifying and lifting three important limitations that make
standard full abstraction unsuitable for compartmentalization. The connection
to full abstraction allows us to prove SCC by adapting established proof
techniques; we illustrate this with a compiler from a simple unsafe imperative
language with procedures to a compartmentalized abstract machine.Comment: Nit
Multi-Dimensional Inheritance
In this paper, we present an alternative approach to multiple inheritance for
typed feature structures. In our approach, a feature structure can be
associated with several types coming from different hierarchies (dimensions).
In case of multiple inheritance, a type has supertypes from different
hierarchies. We contrast this approach with approaches based on a single type
hierarchy where a feature structure has only one unique most general type, and
multiple inheritance involves computation of greatest lower bounds in the
hierarchy. The proposed approach supports current linguistic analyses in
constraint-based formalisms like HPSG, inheritance in the lexicon, and
knowledge representation for NLP systems. Finally, we show that
multi-dimensional inheritance hierarchies can be compiled into a Prolog term
representation, which allows to compute the conjunction of two types
efficiently by Prolog term unification.Comment: 9 pages, styles: a4,figfont,eepic,eps
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