[Colloq] PhD Thesis Proposal - Stevie Strickland

[Rachel Kalweit]

The College of Computer and Information Science presents:

Thesis Proposal Presentation:

Speaker: Stevie Strickland

Date: February 22, 2011 (Tues.) at 3:00 PM
Where: WVH 366

Thesis title: Scaling Contracts to Realistic Languages

Abstract:

Contracts allow programmers to specify the expected behavior and use
of program components separately from the code of the components
themselves.  Since Bertrand Meyer introduced contracts to working
programmers via the Eiffel programming language, Eiffel-like contract
systems have been designed for many other object-oriented
languages. Contract systems are not limited to object-oriented
programming; Findler and Felleisen showed how to add contracts to
languages with higher-order functions and formalized the notions of
contract boundaries and blame.

However, there are two major omissions in existing work on contracts:
mutable data structures, which are used in languages that allow
programming in an imperative style; and first-class components, which
are used in the construction of large-scale software projects.  I
propose extensions to existing contract systems that cover these
omissions.  These contracts must be expressive enough to describe the
protection of these values and guarantee that only guilty parties are
blamed for contract violations, but be efficient enough that
performance concerns do not preclude their use.

Thesis committee:

Matthias Felleisen (advisor)
Matthew Flatt (ext. member, University of Utah)
Olin Shivers
Mitchell Wand