161 papers · page 8 of 9
Typical implementations of dynamically typed languages treat floating-point numbers, or flonums, in a "boxed" form, since those numbers don't fit in a natural machine word if a few bits in the word are reserved for type tags. The naïve implementations allocate every instance of f…
Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG) is a recognition-based foundation for describing syntax that renewed interest in top-down parsing approaches. Generally, the implementation of PEGs is based on a recursive-descent parser, or uses a memoization algorithm. We present a new approach …
Static and dynamic type systems have well-known strengths and weaknesses. Gradual typing provides the benefits of both in a single language by giving the programmer control over which portions of the program are statically checked based on the presence or absence of type annotati…
Context-oriented programming proposes to treat execution context explicitly and to provide means for context-dependent adaptation at runtime. There are many mechanisms that can be used to make either variable bindings or application code adapt dynamically, like dynamically-scoped…
Programming languages are the medium used to express our wishes to a computer. Unlike human languages, we can alter, destroy, and create them at will. Despite this, mainstream programming languages are surprisingly homogeneous with the differences between them often amounting to …
Although the C-based interpreter of Python is reasonably fast, implementations on the CLI or the JVM platforms offers some advantages in terms of robustness and interoperability. Unfortunately, because the CLI and JVM are primarily designed to execute statically typed, object-ori…
With the advent of ambient intelligence and advances in mobile hardware technology, the next generation of software systems will require the ability to gracefully and dynamically adapt to changes in their surrounding environment. Contemporary languages provide no dedicated suppor…
Object aliasing causes as many problems in dynamic languages as it does in static languages. Most existing work on aliasing, such as ownership types, relies on static checking based on annotations and type declarations. We introduce ConstraintedJava, a scripting language based on…
The analogy between types and contracts raises the question of how many features of static type systems can be expressed as dynamic contracts. An important feature missing in prior work on contracts is parametricity, as represented by the polymorphic types in languages like Stand…
From the beginning, Microsoft's .NET framework was designed to support a broad range of different programming languages on a Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR provides shared services to these languages ranging from a world-class GC and JIT to a sandboxed security model to t…
This paper discusses key design decisions faced by a language design team while adding Object Oriented language features to Dyalog, a modern dialect of APL. Although classes and interfaces are first-class language elements in the new language, and arrays can both contain and be c…
In 1973, John Reynold's and James Morris' Gedanken language retrofit object-capability security into an Algol-like base. Today, there are active projects retrofitting Java, Javascript, Python, Mozart/Oz, OCaml, Perl, and Pict. These represent a variety of approaches, with differe…
Mirror-based systems are object-oriented reflective architectures built around a set of design principles that lead to reflective APIs which foster a high degree of reusability, loose coupling with base-level objects and whose structure and design corresponds to the system being …
Reasoning with probabilistic models is a widespread and successful technique in areas ranging from computer vision, to natural language processing, to bioinformatics. Currently, these reasoning systems are either coded from scratch in general-purpose languages or use formalisms s…
This paper presents a package management system for the Scheme programming language. It is inspired by the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) and various GNU/Linux distributions. It downloads, installs, and prepares source codes for execution. It manages the dependencies b…
This paper introduces OMeta, a new object-oriented language for pattern matching. OMeta is based on a variant of Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) [5]---a recognition-based foundation for describing syntax---which we have extended to handle arbitrary kinds of data. We show that …
ContextL is an extension to the Common Lisp Object System that allows for Context-oriented Programming. It provides means to associate partial class and method definitions with layers and to activate and deactivate such layers in the control flow of a running program. When a laye…
In the emerging field of Ambient Intelligence (AmI), software is deployed in wireless open networks of mobile devices. Such open networks require stringent security measures as unknown and untrusted hosts may join the network. In an object-oriented language, where objects are dis…
The DDP (Demand-driven/Pruning) analysis algorithm allows us to perform data-flow analyses of programming languages that are dynamically typed and have higher-order control flow, such as Smalltalk or Scheme. Because it is demand-driven and employs search pruning, it scales to lar…
Compile-time meta-programming allows programs to be constructed by the user at compile-time. Although LISP derived languages have long had such facilities, few modern languages are capable of compile-time meta-programming, and of those that do many of the most powerful are static…