465 papers · page 6 of 24
Based on the concept of explanation sheets, we present an approach to make spreadsheets easier to understand and thus easier to use and maintain. We identify the notion of explanation soundness and show that explanation sheets which conform to simple rules of formula coverage pro…
Command languages like the Bourne Shell provide a terse syntax for exploratory programming and system interaction. Shell users can begin to write programs that automate their tasks by simply copying their interactions verbatim into a script file. However, command languages usuall…
Ownership type qualifiers clarify aliasing invariants that cannot be directly expressed in mainstream programming languages. Adding qualifiers to code, however, often involves significant overhead and difficult interaction.
Real-time systems must meet strict timeliness requirements. These systems also often need to protect their critical program information (CPI) from adversarial interference and intellectual property theft. Trusted execution environments (TEE) execute CPI tasks on a special-purpose…
Software Product Lines (SPLs) are a common technique to capture families of software products in terms of commonalities and variabilities. On a conceptual level, functionality of an SPL is modeled in terms of features in Feature Models (FMs). As other software systems, SPLs and t…
Today's software systems are too complex to ensure security after the fact – security has to be built into systems by design. To this end, model-based techniques such as UMLsec support the design-time specification and analysis of security requirements by providing custom model a…
Regular expressions are part of every programmer’s toolbox. They are used for a wide variety of language-related tasks and there are many algorithms for manipulating them. In particular, matching algorithms that detect whether a word belongs to the language described by a regular…
Recent research on quality assurance (QA) of configurable software systems (e.g., software product lines) proposes different analysis strategies to cope with the inherent complexity caused by the well-known combinatorial-explosion problem. Those strategies aim at improving effici…
With an ever-growing amount of collected data, the importance of visualization as an analysis component is growing in concert. The creation of good visualizations often doesn't happen in one step but is rather an iterative and exploratory process. However, this process is current…
In highly configurable systems, features may interact unexpectedly and produce faulty behavior. Those faults are not easily identified from the analysis of each feature separately, especially when feature specifications are missing. We propose VarXplorer, a dynamic and iterative …
Program generation is indispensable. We propose a novel unification of two existing metaprogramming techniques: multi-stage programming and hygienic generative macros. The former supports runtime code generation and execution in a type-safe manner while the latter offers compile-…
Many modern application domains crucially rely on tensor operations. The optimization of programs that operate on tensors poses difficulties that are not adequately addressed by existing languages and tools. Frameworks such as TensorFlow offer good abstractions for tensor operati…
In spite of the fact that many sensors in use today are binary (i.e. produce only values of 0 and 1), and that useful context-aware applications are built exclusively on top of them, there is currently no development approach specifically targeted to binary sensors. Dealing with …
Pattern matching is a pervasive and useful feature in functional programming. There have been many attempts to bring similar notions to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) in the past. However, a key challenge in OOP is how pattern matching can coexist with the open nature of OOP d…
Build systems are crucial for software system development, however there is a lack of tool support to help with their high maintenance overhead. GNU Autotools are widely used in the open source community, but users face various challenges from its hard to comprehend nature and st…
This paper reformulates type qualifiers as language extensions that can be automatically and reliably composed. Type qualifiers annotate type expressions to introduce new subtyping relations and are powerful enough to detect many kinds of errors. Type qualifiers, as illustrated i…
GNU Guix is a "functional" package manager that borrows from earlier work on Nix by Dolstra et al.. Guix implements high-level abstractions such as packages and operating system services as domain-specific languages (DSL) embedded in Scheme, and it also implements build actions a…
In the last decade refactoring research has seen an exponential growth. I will attempt to map this vast landscape and the advances that the community has made by answering questions such as who does what, when, where, with who, why, and how. I will muse on some of the factors con…
Preprocessor annotations (e.g., #ifdef in C) enable the development of similar, but distinct software variants from a common code base. One particularly popular preprocessor is the C preprocessor, cpp. But the cpp is also widely criticized for impeding software maintenance by mak…