Refactoring pattern matching

Defining functions by pattern matching over the arguments is advantageous for understanding and reasoning, but it tends to expose the implementation of a datatype. Significant effort has been invested in tackling this loss of modularity; however, decoupling patterns from concrete representations while maintaining soundness of reasoning has been a challenge. Inspired by the development of invertible programming, we propose an approach to program refactoring based on a right-invertible language rinv—every function has a right (or pre-) inverse. We show how this new design is able to permit a smooth incremental transition from programs with algebraic datatypes and pattern matching, to ones with proper encapsulation, while maintaining simple and sound reasoning

Analytical Differential Calculus with Integration

Differential lambda-calculus was first introduced by Thomas Ehrhard and Laurent Regnier in 2003. Despite more than 15 years of history, little work has been done on a differential calculus with integration. In this paper, we shall propose a differential calculus with integration from a programming point of view. We show its good correspondence with mathematics, which is manifested by how we construct these reduction rules and how we preserve important mathematical theorems in our calculus. Moreover, we highlight applications of the calculus in incremental computation, automatic differentiation, and computation approximation

Guest editorial to the special section on model transformation

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0388-7Modeling is a key element in reducing the complexity of the development and maintenance of software systems. Software engineering paradigms like model-driven engineering (MDE) consider models as the primary elements in the software construction process. In this setting, model transformations are essential for elevating models from documentation elements to first-class artifacts of the development. Model transformation includes model-to-text transformation to generate code from models, text-to-model transformations to parse textual representations to model representations, model extraction to derive higher-level models from legacy code, and model-to-model transformations to normalize, weave, optimize, simulate, and refactor models, as well as to translate between modeling languages

Bidirectional Transformation "bx" (Dagstuhl Seminar 11031)

Bidirectional transformations bx are a mechanism for maintaining the consistency of two (or more) related sources of information. Researchers from many different areas of computer science including databases (DB), graph transformations (GT), software engineering (SE), and programming languages (PL) are actively investigating the use of bx to solve a diverse set of problems. Although researchers have been actively working on bidirectional transformations in the above mentioned communities for many years already, there has been very little cross-discipline interaction and cooperation so far. The purpose of a first International Meeting on Bidirectional Transformations (GRACE-BX), held in December 2008 near Tokyo, was therefore to bring together international elites, promising young researchers, and leading practitioners to share problems, discuss solutions, and open a dialogue towards understanding the common underpinnings of bx in all these areas. While the GRACE-BX meeting provided a starting point for exchanging ideas in different communities and confirmed our believe that there is a considerable overlap of studied problems and developed solutions in the identified communities, the Dagstuhl Seminar 11031 on ``Bidirectional Transformations\u27\u27 also aimed at providing a place for working together to define a common vocabulary of terms and desirable properties of bidirectional transformations, develop a suite of benchmarks, solve some challenging problems, and launch joint efforts to form a living bx community of cooperating experts across the identified subdisciplines. This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 11031 with abstracts of tutorials, working groups, and presentations on specific research topics

Feature-Based Classification of Bidirectional Transformation Approaches

International audienceBidirectional model transformation is a key technology in model-driven engineering (MDE), when two models that can change over time have to be kept constantly consistent with each other. While several model transformation tools include at least a partial support to bidirectionality, it is not clear how these bidirectional capabilities relate to each other and to similar classical problems in computer science, from the view update problem in databases to bidirectional graph transformations. This paper tries to clarify and visualize the space of design choices for bidirectional transformations from an MDE point of view, in the form of a feature model. The selected list of existing approaches are characterized by mapping them to the feature model. Then, the feature model is used to highlight some unexplored research lines in bidirectional transformations

Issues in representing domain-specific concerns in model-driven engineering

The integration of domain-specific concepts in a model-driven engineering (MDE) approach raises a number of interesting research questions. There are two possibilities to represent these concepts. The first one focuses on models that contain domain-specific concepts only, i.e. domain-specific modelling languages (DSML). The second one advocates the integration of domain-specific concepts in general-purpose models, using what we will refer to in this paper as domain-specific modelling annotation languages (DSMAL). In this position paper, we argue that each approach is particularly suited for specific activities and specific actors, and show how they can be developed and used together. We also highlight the challenges created by the use of two representations, such as the evaluation of models OCL constraints and the synchronisation between the two representations. As an illustration, we present rbacUML, our approach for integrating role-based access control (RBAC) concepts into an MDE approach