Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing

As the 19th century drew to a close, logicians formalized an ideal notion of proof. They were driven by nothing other than an abiding interest in truth, and their proofs were as ethereal as the mind of God. Yet within decades these mathematical abstractions were realized by the hand of man, in the digital stored-program computer. How it came to be recognized that proofs and programs are the same thing is a story that spans a century, a chase with as many twists and turns as a thriller. At the end of the story is a new principle for designing programming languages that will guide computers into the 21st century. For my money, Gentzen’s natural deduction and Church’s lambda calculus are on a par with Einstein’s relativity and Dirac’s quantum physics for elegance and insight. And the maths are a lot simpler. I want to show you the essence of these ideas. I’ll need a few symbols, but not too many, and I’ll explain as I go along. To simplify, I’ll present the story as we understand it now, with some asides to fill in the history. First, I’ll introduce Gentzen’s natural deduction, a formalism for proofs. Next, I’ll introduce Church’s lambda calculus, a formalism for programs. Then I’ll explain why proofs and programs are really the same thing, and how simplifying a proof corresponds to executing a program. Finally, I’ll conclude with a look at how these principles are being applied to design a new generation of programming languages, particularly mobile code for the Internet

You and Your Research and the Elements of Style

This talk surveys advice from experts, including Richard Hamming, William Strunk, E. B. White, Donald Knuth, and others, on how to conduct your research and communicate your results

Comprehending monads

Category theorists invented monads in the 1960's to concisely express certain aspects of universal algebra. Functional programmers invented list comprehensions in the 1970's to concisely express certain programs involving lists. This paper shows how list comprehensions may be generalised to an arbitrary monad, and how the resulting programming feature can concisely express in a pure functional language some programs that manipulate state, handle exceptions, parse text, or invoke continuations. A new solution to the old problem of destructive array update is also presented. No knowledge of category theory is assumed

Abstract Data Types without the Types. Dedicated to David Turner on the occasion of his 70'th birthday

The data abstraction mechanism of Miranda may be adapted to a dynamically typed programming language by applying ideas from gradual typing

A complement to blame

Contracts, gradual typing, and hybrid typing all permit less-precisely typed and more-precisely typed code to interact. Blame calculus encompasses these, and guarantees blame safety: blame for type errors always lays with less-precisely typed code. This paper serves as a complement to the literature on blame calculus: it elaborates on motivation, comments on the reception of the work, critiques some work for not properly attending to blame, and looks forward to applications. No knowledge of contracts, gradual typing, hybrid typing, or blame calculus is assumed

Monadic constraint programming

A constraint programming system combines two essential components: a constraint solver and a search engine. The constraint solver reasons about satisfiability of conjunctions of constraints, and the search engine controls the search for solutions by iteratively exploring a disjunctive search tree defined by the constraint program. In this paper we give a monadic definition of constraint programming in which the solver is defined as a monad threaded through the monadic search tree. We are then able to define search and search strategies as first-class objects that can themselves be built or extended by composable search transformers. Search transformers give a powerful and unifying approach to viewing search in constraint programming, and the resulting constraint programming system is first class and extremely flexible