[Colloq] PhD Thesis Defense - Bryan Chadwick, Wednesday, Aug. 18

[Rachel Kalweit]

The College of Computer and Information Science Presents:

PhD Thesis Defense by: Bryan Chadwick

When: Wednesday, August 18th, 11:00am

Place: 366 West Village H

Title: Functional Adaptive Programming

Abstract:
       The development of complex software requires the implementation of
    operations over recursively defined data structures.  Complex data
    structures lead to an increase of code dealing with structure access
    and navigation.  This `boilerplate' code in turn makes programs
    tedious to develop, difficult to maintain, prone to errors, and
    separates important functionality, all of which result in the loss of
    clarity.  Generic (or polytypic) programming and higher order
    functions can resolve some of these issues, but are usually too
    general to be practically useful for large collections of data types.
       This dissertation proposes a new approach to developing
    structure-based functions and describes an implementation of these
    ideas in Java, called DemeterF.  Our approach uses function-objects
    over an adaptive traversal to implement deep, fold-like functions over
    data structures.  Function-classes/objects provide a useful and
    flexible form of generic programming that adapts to different data
    structures using a type-based multiple dispatch.  We model DemeterF
    with function sets and structural recursion, and give it a type system
    that shows our function-objects, multiple dispatch, and traversals can
    be checked for safety.  In order to show that our approach is
    efficient we present the results of several performance tests
    comparing DemeterF to hand-written methods and visitor implementations
    in Java.

Committee:
    Karl Lieberherr (advisor)
    Rajmohan Rajaraman
    Riccardo Pucella
    Yannis Smaragdakis