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For my parents. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to my parents and to my brother Mark for their support. Thanks also go to my advisor Tony Hosking for letting me work for him, and to the other members of my thesis committee, Jens Palsberg and Aditya Mathur. I would also like to thank Steve Lennon and Quintin Cutts at the University of Glasgow for their input and bug reports and the rest of the PJama group at Glasgow and SunLabs. Thank you to Kumar Brahnmath for using BLOAT and for finding many of the bugs. Finally, thanks to Aria, Gustavo, Raghu, Mike, Anshul, and Shaogang. ii