2,199 papers · page 94 of 110
One of the most important pragmatic advantages of functional languages is that concurrency in a program is implicit -- there is no need for special constructs to express parallelism as is required in most conventional languages. Furthermore, it is fairly easy for compilers to aut…
A function is said to be strict in one of its formal parameters if, in all calls to the function, either the corresponding actual parameter is evaluated, or the call does not terminate. Detecting which arguments a function will surely evaluate is a problem that arises often in pr…
We present an overview of the FASE system for executable specifications based upon final, rather than initial, algebras. Particular emphasis is placed upon the execution of expressions involving quantifiers. The need for such expressions is explained, as is our method for evaluat…
A crucial aspect of a program intended for general use is its behavior in the presence of erroneous inputs. For instance, much attention has been devoted to the problems of error detection, reporting, and correction in compilers1,2. As programming languages and systems based in o…
Data or program flow analysis is concerned with the static analysis of programs, to obtain as much information as possible about their possible run time behavior without actually having to run the programs. Due to the unsolvability of the halting problem (and nearly any other que…
The attribute grammar technique used for design of structure editors is suggested as a foundation for building hierarchical incremental design editors for VLSI circuits. The usual definition of attribute grammars is extended: the cycles that occur in VLSI design make us come to t…
Computations can generally be separated into stages, which are distinguished from one another by either frequency of execution or availability of data. Precomputation and frequency reduction involve moving computation among a collection of stages so that work is done as early as …
Global storage allocation for attributes in an attribute grammar evaluator is discussed and an algorithm for determining if a given set of attribute occurrences can share a common global storage is obtained.
Explicit use of knowledge expressions in the design of distributed algorithms is explored. A non-trivial case study is carried through, illustrating the facilities that a design language could have for setting and deleting the knowledge that the processes possess about the global…
Our concern is the mechanical certification of transformations of sequential program executions into parallel executions with equivalent semantics. The objective of such transformations is to accelerate the execution of programs. The result reported here is a mechanically certifi…
Modules in a distributed program are active, communicating entities. A language for distributed programs must choose a set of communication primitives and a structure for processes. This paper examines one possible choice: synchronous communication primitives (such as rendez-vous…
Writing any large program poses difficult problems of organization. In many modern programming languages these problems are addressed by special linguistic constructs, variously known as modules, packages, or clusters, which provide for partitioning programs into manageable compo…
A function has a dependent type when the type of its result depends upon the value of its argument. Dependent types originated in the type theory of intuitionistic mathematics and have reappeared independently in programming languages such as CLU, Pebble, and Russell. Some of the…
One purpose of type checking in programming languages is to guarantee a degree of "representation independence:" programs should not depend on the way stacks are represented, only on the behavior of stacks with respect to push and pop operations. In languages with abstract data t…
It has been recognised that languages like Concurrent Prolog and Parlog which use committed choice non-determinism have departed from the original concept of logic programming, but no new paradigm has been suggested. In this paper we propose that programs in such languages be vie…
A major drawback to the use of attribute grammars in language-based editors has been that attributes can only depend on neighboring attributes in a program's syntax tree. This paper concerns new attribute-grammar-based methods that, for a suitable class of grammars, overcome this…
Language-specific editors for typed programming languages must contain a subsystem for semantic analysis in order to guarantee correctness of programs with respect to the context conditions of the language. As programs are usually incomplete during development, the semantic analy…
It is a truism that most bugs are detected only at a great distance from their source. Although polymorphic type-checking systems like those in ML help greatly by detecting potential run-time type errors at compile-time, such systems are still not very helpful for locating the so…
We show that the class of properties of programs expressible in propositional temporal logic can be substantially extended if we assume the programs to be data-independent. Basically, a program is data-independent if its behavior does not depend on the specific data it operates u…
The paradigm of equational programming potentially possesses all the features provided by Prolog-like languages. In addition, the ability to reason about equations, which is not provided by Prolog, can be accommodated by equational languages. In this paper, we propose an extended…