[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Two talks:  Tuesday, March 22, 2005, and Wednesday March 23, 2005


Tuesday, March 22, 2005
2:00-3:00pm
**Note nonstandard day and time**
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)


Jim Miller
Microsoft

Innovation in the Real World: Making Generics Mainstream
 
The notion of generic types, in one form or another, has been around for
over 25 years.  But their introduction into Java, C#, Visual Basic,
COBOL, C++, FORTRAN, and PASCAL will make them available to "the average
programmer."  This talk describes the real-world engineering issues
involved in making this happen - from the technical difficulties, to the
scheduling issues, to the political realities of changing a platform
that's in use by (literally) millions of developers.  We'll also talk
about the very tricky process by which innovations move from research
prototypes into fully supported, widely deployed systems.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005
11:45-1:15
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Cormac Flanagan
UC Santa Cruz

Type Systems for Multithreaded Software

Developing correct multithreaded software is very challenging, due to 
the potential for unintended interference between threads. We present 
type systems for verifying two key non-interference properties in 
multithreaded software: race-freedom and atomicity. Verifying 
atomicity is particularly valuable since atomic procedures can be 
understood according to their sequential semantics, which 
significantly simplifies subsequent (formal and informal) correctness 
arguments. We will describe our experience applying these type systems 
and corresponding type inference algorithms to standard multithreaded 
benchmarks and other applications, and illustrate some defects 
revealed by this approach.

Upcoming Events:

3/30 Felix Klock
4/ 6 Eli Barzilay: Implementing Syntactic Reflection in Nuprl

--Mitch