Blame for all

Conference paper presented at the Workshop on Script to Program Evolution (STOP)We present a language that integrates statically and dynamically typed components, similar to the gradual types of Siek and Taha (2006), and extend it to incorporate parametric polymorphism. Our system permits a dynamically typed value to be cast to a polymorphic type, with the type enforced by dynamic sealing along the lines proposed by Pierce and Sumii (2000), Matthews and Ahmed (2008), and Neis, Dreyer, and Rossberg (2009), in a way that ensures all terms satisfy relational parametricity. Our system includes a notion of blame, which allows us to show that when more-typed and less-typed portions of a program interact, that any type failures are due to the less-typed portion

The Racket Manifesto

The creation of a programming language calls for guiding principles that point the developers to goals. This article spells out the three basic principles behind the 20-year development of Racket. First, programming is about stating and solving problems, and this activity normally takes place in a context with its own language of discourse; good programmers ought to formulate this language as a programming language. Hence, Racket is a programming language for creating new programming languages. Second, by following this language-oriented approach to programming, systems become multi-lingual collections of interconnected components. Each language and component must be able to protect its specific invariants. In support, Racket offers protection mechanisms to implement a full language spectrum, from C-level bit manipulation to soundly typed extensions. Third, because Racket considers programming as problem solving in the correct language, Racket also turns extra-linguistic mechanisms into linguistic constructs, especially mechanisms for managing resources and projects. The paper explains these principles and how Racket lives up to them, presents the evaluation framework behind the design process, and concludes with a sketch of Racket\u27s imperfections and opportunities for future improvements

Towards Practical Gradual Typing

Over the past 20 years, programmers have embraced dynamically-typed programming languages. By now, they have also come to realize that programs in these languages lack reliable type information for software engineering purposes. Gradual typing addresses this problem; it empowers programmers to annotate an existing system with sound type information on a piecemeal basis. This paper presents an implementation of a gradual type system for a full-featured class-based language as well as a novel performance evaluation framework for gradual typing

Extensible Access Control with Authorization Contracts

Existing programming language access control frameworks do not meet the needs of all software components.We propose an expressive framework for implementing access control monitors for components. The basis of the framework is a novel concept: the authority environment. An authority environment associates rights with an execution context. The building blocks of access control monitors in our framework are authorization contracts: software contracts that manage authority environments. We demonstrate the expressiveness of our framework by implementing a diverse set of existing access control mechanisms and writing custom access control monitors for three realistic case studies.Engineering and Applied Science

Behavioral Software Contracts

To sustain a market for software components, component producers and consumers must agree on contracts. These contracts must specify each party's obligations. To ensure that both sides meet their obligations, they must also agree on standards for monitoring contracts and assigning blame for contract violations. Thi

Contract soundness for object-oriented languages

Checking pre- and post-conditions of procedures and methods at runtime helps improve software reliability. In the procedural world, pre- and post-conditions have a straightforward interpretation. If a procedure’s pre-condition doesn’t hold, the caller failed to establish the proper context. If a post-condition doesn’t hold, the procedure failed to compute the expected result. In the object-oriented world, checking pre- and post-conditions for methods, often called contracts in this context, poses complex problems. Because methods may be overridden, it is not sufficient to check only pre- and post-conditions. In addition, the contract hierarchy must be checked to ensure that the contracts on overridden methods are properly related to the contracts on overriding methods. Otherwise, a class hierarchy may violate the substitution principle, that is, it may no longer be true that an instance of a class is substitutable for objects of the super-class. In this paper, we study the problem of contract enforcement in an object-oriented world from a foundational perspective. More specifically, we study contracts as refinements of types. Pushing the analogy further, we state and prove a contract soundness theorem that captures the essential properties of contract enforcement. We use the theorem to illustrate how most existing tools suffer from a fundamental flaw and how they can be improved. 1