PhD Abstracts
Many students complete PhDs in functional programming each year. As a service to the community, twice per year the Journal of Functional Programming publishes the abstracts from PhD dissertations completed during the previous year.
26,098 papers · page 359 of 1,305
Explicit effect subtyping
Abstract As popularity of algebraic effects and handlers increases, so does a demand for their efficient execution. Eff, an ML-like language with native support for handlers, has a subtyping-based effect system on which an effect-aware optimising compiler could be built. Unfortun…
Many more predecessors: A representation workout
Abstract From the outset, lambda calculus represented natural numbers through iterated application. The successor hence adds one more application, and the predecessor removes. In effect, the predecessor un-applies a term—which seemed impossible, even to Church. It took Kleene a r…
Local algebraic effect theories
Abstract Algebraic effects are computational effects that can be described with a set of basic operations and equations between them. As many interesting effect handlers do not respect these equations, most approaches assume a trivial theory, sacrificing both reasoning power and …
Elastic sheet-defined functions: Generalising spreadsheet functions to variable-size input arrays
Abstract Sheet-defined functions (SDFs) bring modularity and abstraction to the world of spreadsheets. Alas, end users naturally write SDFs that work over fixed-size arrays, which limits their reusability. To help end user programmers write more reusable SDFs, we describe a princ…
Build systems à la carte: Theory and practice
Abstract Build systems are awesome, terrifying – and unloved. They are used by every developer around the world, but are rarely the object of study. In this paper, we offer a systematic, and executable, framework for developing and comparing build systems, viewing them as related…
Type-Driven Development with Idris
Type-Driven Development with IdrisProgramming languages that support dependent types provide us with an expressive environment in which we can specify and reason about properties of our software programs.Type-Driven Development with Idris is an introductory text to dependently ty…
Fault-tolerant functional reactive programming (extended version)
Abstract Highly critical application domains, like medicine and aerospace, require the use of strict design, implementation, and validation techniques. Functional languages have been used in these domains to develop synchronous dataflow programming languages for reactive systems.…
Runtime verification and validation of functional reactive systems
Abstract Many types of interactive applications, including reactive systems implemented in hardware, interactive physics simulations and games, raise particular challenges when it comes to testing and debugging. Reasons include de facto lack of reproducibility and difficulties of…
Generalized monoidal effects and handlers
Abstract Algebraic effects and handlers are a convenient method for structuring monadic effects with primitive effectful operations and separating the syntax from the interpretation of these operations. However, the scope of conventional handlers is limited as not all side effect…
Faster coroutine pipelines: A reconstruction
Abstract The three-continuation approach to coroutine pipelines efficiently represents a large number of connected components. Previous work in this area introduces this alternative encoding but does not shed much light on the underlying principles for deriving this encoding from…
Review of "Algorithms for Functional Programming" by John David Stone, Springer-Verlag, 2018
Many textbooks start out as informal notes for university courses, refined through repeated offerings.The book under review came out of the author's experiences as a lecturer at an American liberal-arts college, Grinnell, where the first course in computation used Scheme for many…
Review of "Functional and Reactive Domain Modeling" by Debasish Ghosh, Manning, 2017, ISBN 978-1-617-29224-8
Heterogeneous binary random-access lists
Writing an evaluator for the simply typed lambda calculus is a classic example of a dependently typed program that appears in numerous tutorials (McBride, 2004; Norell, 2009, 2013; Abel, 2016). The central idea is to represent the well-typed lambda terms over some universe U usin…
Review of "The Little Prover" by Daniel P. Friedman and Carl Eastlund, MIT Press, 2015
Origins of the D programming language
As its name suggests, the initial motivation for the D programming language was to improve on C and C++ while keeping their spirit. The D language was to preserve those languages' efficiency, low-level access, and Algol-style syntax. The areas D set out to improve focused initial…
S, R, and data science
Data science is increasingly important and challenging. It requires computational tools and programming environments that handle big data and difficult computations, while supporting creative, high-quality analysis. The R language and related software play a major role in computi…
Hygienic macro technology
The fully parenthesized Cambridge Polish syntax of Lisp, originally regarded as a temporary expedient to be replaced by more conventional syntax, possesses a peculiar virtue: A read procedure can parse it without knowing the syntax of any expressions, statements, definitions, or …
The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT
The roots of Objective-C began at ITT in the early 1980s in a research group led by Tom Love investigating improving programmer productivity by an order of magnitude, a concern motivated by the perceived "software crisis" articulated in the late 1960s. In 1981, Brad Cox, a member…
Verilog HDL and its ancestors and descendants
This paper describes the history of the Verilog hardware description language (HDL), including its influential predecessors and successors. Since its creation in 1984 and first sale in 1985, Verilog has completely revolutionized the design of hardware. Verilog enabled the develop…