research-article

Kind analysis for MATLAB

Authors:

OOPSLA '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications

Pages 99 - 118

https://doi.org/10.1145/2048066.2048077

Published: 22 October 2011 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

MATLAB is a popular dynamic programming language used for scientific and numerical programming. As a language, it has evolved from a small scripting language intended as an interactive interface to numerical libraries, to a very popular language supporting many language features and libraries. The overloaded syntax and dynamic nature of the language, plus the somewhat organic addition of language features over the years, makes static analysis of modern MATLAB quite challenging. A fundamental problem in MATLAB is determining the kind of an identifier. Does an identifier refer to a variable, a named function or a prefix? Although this is a trivial problem for most programming languages, it was not clear how to do this properly in MATLAB. Furthermore, there was no simple explanation of kind analysis suitable for MATLAB programmers, nor a publicly-available implementation suitable for compiler researchers.

This paper explains the required background of MATLAB, clarifies the kind assignment program, and proposes some general guidelines for developing good kind analyses. Based on these foundations we present our design and implementation of a variety of kind analyses, including an approach that matches the intended behaviour of modern MATLAB 7 and two potentially better alternatives.

We have implemented all the variations of the kind analysis in McLab, our extensible compiler framework, and we present an empirical evaluation of the various analyses on a large set of benchmark programs.

References

[1]

G. Almási and D. Padua. MaJIC: compiling MATLAB for speed and responsiveness. In PLDI '02: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, pages 294--303, New York, NY, USA, 2002. ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

M. Chevalier-Boisvert, L. Hendren, and C. Verbrugge. Optimizing MATLAB through Just-In-Time Specialization. In International Conference on Compiler Construction, pages 46--65, March 2010.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

INRIA. Scilab, 2009. http://www.scilab.org/platform/.

Google Scholar

[4]

P. G. Joisha and P. Banerjee. Correctly detecting intrinsic type errors in typeless languages such as MATLAB. In APL '01: Proceedings of the 2001 conference on APL, pages 7--21, New York, NY, USA, 2001. ACM.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

J. Li. McFOR: A MATLAB to FORTRAN 95 compiler. Master's thesis, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 2009.

Google Scholar

[6]

MathWorks. MATLAB Documentation, 2010. http://www.mathworks.com/.

Google Scholar

[7]

McLab. McLab. http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/mclab/.

Google Scholar

[8]

Octave. GNU Octave. http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index.html.

Google Scholar

[9]

L. D. Rose and D. Padua. Techniques for the translation of MATLAB programs into Fortran 90. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 21(2):286--323, 1999.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Salazar FGuamán-Molina JSaltos CCunalata WFernández-S A(2023)Application of the MQTT Protocol for the Control of a Scorbot Robot by Means of EGG Electroencephalographic SignalsCSEI: International Conference on Computer Science, Electronics and Industrial Engineering (CSEI)10.1007/978-3-031-30592-4_27(390-411)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30592-4_27
Kiepas PKozlak JTadonki CAncourt CScholz SShivers O(2018)Profile-based vectorization for MATLABProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Libraries, Languages, and Compilers for Array Programming10.1145/3219753.3219756(18-23)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3219753.3219756
Pradel MSchuh PSen KBertolino ACanfora GElbaum S(2015)TypeDevilProceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 110.5555/2818754.2818795(314-324)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2818754.2818795
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Kind analysis for MATLAB
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers

Recommendations

Kind analysis for MATLAB
OOPSLA '11

MATLAB is a popular dynamic programming language used for scientific and numerical programming. As a language, it has evolved from a small scripting language intended as an interactive interface to numerical libraries, to a very popular language ...
PID Control of Inverted Pendulum Using Adams and Matlab Co-Simulation
ICCMA '16: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Control, Mechatronics and Automation

This research is aimed at developing a multi-body simulation model and control of an inverted pendulum. A virtual prototype of the inverted pendulum is built by using MSC Adams software and the plant model is exported to MATLAB. It is co-simulated in ...
First steps to compiling Matlab to X10
X10 '13: Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN X10 Workshop

Matlab is a popular dynamic array-based language commonly used by students, scientists and engineers, who appreciate the interactive development style, the rich set of array operators, the extensive builtin library, and the fact that they do not have to ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

OOPSLA '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications

October 2011

1104 pages

ISBN:9781450309400

DOI:10.1145/2048066

General Chair:
Cristina Videira Lopes
University of California, Irvine, USA
,
Program Chair:
Kathleen Fisher
Tufts University, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 46, Issue 10
OOPSLA '11
October 2011
1063 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2076021
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SPLASH '11

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

SPLASH '11: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 22 - 27, 2011

Oregon, Portland, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,244 submissions, 22%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

21
Total Citations
View Citations
416
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)13
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Salazar FGuamán-Molina JSaltos CCunalata WFernández-S A(2023)Application of the MQTT Protocol for the Control of a Scorbot Robot by Means of EGG Electroencephalographic SignalsCSEI: International Conference on Computer Science, Electronics and Industrial Engineering (CSEI)10.1007/978-3-031-30592-4_27(390-411)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30592-4_27
Kiepas PKozlak JTadonki CAncourt CScholz SShivers O(2018)Profile-based vectorization for MATLABProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Libraries, Languages, and Compilers for Array Programming10.1145/3219753.3219756(18-23)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3219753.3219756
Pradel MSchuh PSen KBertolino ACanfora GElbaum S(2015)TypeDevilProceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 110.5555/2818754.2818795(314-324)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2818754.2818795
Pradel MSchuh PSen K(2015)TypeDevil: Dynamic Type Inconsistency Analysis for JavaScript2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2015.51(314-324)Online publication date: May-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2015.51
Kumar VHendren L(2014)MIX10ACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2714064.266021849:10(617-636)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2714064.2660218
Kumar VHendren LBlack AMillstein T(2014)MIX10Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages & Applications10.1145/2660193.2660218(617-636)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2660193.2660218
Li XHendren L(2014)Mc2FOR: A tool for automatically translating MATLAB to FORTRAN 952014 Software Evolution Week - IEEE Conference on Software Maintenance, Reengineering, and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE)10.1109/CSMR-WCRE.2014.6747175(234-243)Online publication date: Feb-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSMR-WCRE.2014.6747175
Kumar VHendren LHind MGrove D(2013)First steps to compiling Matlab to X10Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN X10 Workshop10.1145/2481268.2481273(2-11)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2481268.2481273
Bispo JPinto PNobre RCarvalho TCardoso JDiniz P(2013)The MATISSE MATLAB compiler2013 11th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN)10.1109/INDIN.2013.6622952(602-608)Online publication date: Jul-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/INDIN.2013.6622952
Cardoso JFernandes JMonteiro MCarvalho TNobre R(2013)Enriching MATLAB with aspect-oriented features for developing embedded systemsJournal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal10.1016/j.sysarc.2013.04.00359:7(412-428)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.sysarc.2013.04.003
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations