ICFP

Microscopic physics is entirely reversible, yet almost all computation is done using irreversible processes. Adding two numbers together, for example, destroys information, unless one of the numbers is retained. Over the past few years, some advantages ...

To improve the quality of type error messages in functional programming languages,we propose four techniques which influence the behaviour of constraint-based type inference processes. These techniques take the form of externally supplied type inference ...

We propose a type system for locating the source of type errors in an applied lambda calculus with ML-style polymorphism. The system is based on discriminative sum types---known from work on soft typing---with annotation subtyping and recursive types. ...

We propose a type system ML^F that generalizes ML with first-class polymorphism as in System F. Expressions may contain second-order type annotations. Every typable expression admits a principal type, which however depends on type annotations. Principal ...

We propose a conservative extension of HM(X), a generic constraint-based type inference framework, with bounded existential (a.k.a. abstract) and universal (a.k.a. polymorphic) data-types. In the first part of the article, which remains abstract of the ...

We present the functional language CDuce, discuss some design issues, and show its adequacy for working with XML documents. Distinctive features of CDuce are a powerful pattern matching, first class functions, overloaded functions, a very rich type ...

Pattern matching mechanisms based on regular expressions feature in a number of recent languages for processing tree-structured data such as XML. A compiler for such a language must address not only the familiar problems of pattern optimization for ML-...

A three-year study collected information bearing on the question of whether studying mathematics improves programming skills. An analysis of the data revealed significant differences in the programming effectiveness of two populations of students: (1) ...

Type abstraction is a key feature of ML-like languages for writing large programs. Marshalling is necessary for writing distributed programs, exchanging values via network byte-streams or persistent stores. In this paper we combine the two, developing ...

Most programming languages adopt static binding, but for distributed programming an exclusive reliance on static binding is too restrictive: dynamic binding is required in various guises, for example when a marshalled value is received from the network, ...

Program analysis is the heart of modern compilers. Most control flow analyses are reduced to the problem of finding a fixed point in a certain transition system, and such fixed point is commonly computed through an iterative procedure that repeats ...

We give a tutorial and first-principles description of the context semantics of Gonthier, Abadi, and Lévy [5, 4], a computer-science analogue of Girard's geometry of interaction [3]. In the spirit of the invited presentation of Tom Knight (see this ...

This paper define the semantics of MinAML, an idealized aspect-oriented programming language, by giving a type-directed translation from its user-friendly external language to its compact, well-defined core language. We argue that our framework is an ...

Generic Haskell is an extension of Haskell that supports the construction of generic programs. During the development of several applications, such as an XML editor and compressor, we encountered a number of limitations with the existing (Classic) ...

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is a framework for reactive programming in a functional setting. FRP has been applied to a number of domains, such as graphical animation, graphical user interfaces, robotics, and computer vision. Recently, we have ...

We describe extensions to the Excel spreadsheet that integrate user-defined functions into the spreadsheet grid, rather than treating them as a "bolt-on". Our first objective was to bring the benefits of additional programming language features to a ...

The shift and reset operators, proposed by Danvy and Filinski, are powerful control primitives for capturing delimited continuations. Delimited continuation is a similar concept as the standard (unlimited) continuation, but it represents part of the ...

The rules of classical logic may be formulated in pairs corresponding to De Morgan duals: rules about & are dual to rules about V. A line of work, including that of Filinski (1989), Griffin (1990), Parigot (1992), Danos, Joinet, and Schellinx (1995), ...

All classical ?-terms typable with disjunctive normal forms are shown to share a common computational behavior: they implement a local exception handling mechanism whose exact workings depend on the tautology. Equivalent and more efficient control ...

We develop an explicit two level system that allows programmers to reason about the behavior of effectful programs. The first level is an ordinary ML-style type system, which confers standard properties on program behavior. The second level is a ...

This paper presents a static type system for JAVA Virtual Machine (JVM) code that enforces an access control mechanism similar to the one found, for example, in a JAVA implementation. In addition to verifying type consistency of a given JVM code, the ...

We present the derivation of a space efficient parser combinator library: the constructed parsers do not keep unnecessary references to the input, produce online results and efficiently handle ambiguous grammars. The underlying techniques can be applied ...

Higher-order abstract syntax is a simple technique for implementing languages with functional programming. Object variables and binders are implemented by variables and binders in the host language. By using this technique, one can avoid implementing ...

FreshML extends ML with elegant and practical constructs for declaring and manipulating syntactical data involving statically scoped binding operations. User-declared FreshML datatypes involving binders are concrete, in the sense that values of these ...

By allowing the programmer to write code that can generate code at run-time, meta-programming offers a powerful approach to program construction. For instance, meta-programming can often be employed to enhance program efficiency and facilitate the ...

Lazy programs are beautiful, but they are slow because they build many thunks. Simple measurements show that most of these thunks are unnecessary: they are in fact always evaluated, or are always cheap. In this paper we describe Optimistic Evaluation ---...