[Colloq] Reminder: PhD Thesis Proposal - Bryan Chadwick, Monday, March 30

[Rachel Kalweit]

Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Bryan Chadwick

Date: Monday, March 30
Time: 11:00am
Location: 366 West Village H

Title: Functional Adaptive Programming

Abstract:
  Traversals are everywhere in programs, from simple array iteration
to complex functions over mutually recursive data structures. While
hand-written traversals are flexible and perform well, they are
difficult to adapt to data structure changes or different execution
environments.  Visitors are used to implement operations outside a
given class hierarchy, but traversal is usually hand-coded within
visitor methods or computation is performed via side effects, which
makes programs more difficult to understand and analyze.  Adaptive
Programming (AP) separates traversals and visitors by providing a
succinct control language, but computation is also performed using
side effects.  Combining the strengths of AP with those of functional
programming we propose Functional Adaptive Programming (AP-F).
   AP-F separates functions from structures and traversals while
connecting the two with types.  The separate traversal adapts to data
structure changes, retaining the flexibility of hand-coded traversal
through a fine grained type system.  Our thesis focuses on safety,
(traversals are well behaved) and efficiency (traversal and function
dispatch are fast). To validate AP-F we have developed a model, type
system, and a Java implementation. The type system is sound with
respect to our model, and the implementation, DemeterF, provides
various traversal implementations with different levels of efficiency
and resource needs.  The DemeterF type checker validates the
combination of a function class with a given structural traversal and
provides performance enhancements such as static traversal generation
and function dispatch inlining.

PhD committee:
Matthias Felleisen
Karl Lieberherr (advisor)
Riccardo Pucella
Yannis Smaragdakis, University of Massachusetts (external examiner)

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