[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
11:45-1:30
**NOTE CORRECTED ROOM**
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Nikolaos Papaspyrou
National Technical University of Athens

Continuations for Prototyping Concurrent Languages

Continuation Semantics for Concurrency (CSC) is a technique
that attempts to exploit the benefits of using continuations
in concurrent systems development.  In CSC, a continuation
is an application-dependent configuration of computations
(partially evaluated denotations).  Every computation or
group of computations contained in a continuation can be
accessed and manipulated separately by the denotational
semantic function.  The CSC technique provides excellent
flexibility and a "pure" continuation-based approach to
communication and concurrency, in which all control concepts
are modeled as operations manipulating continuations.

This talk is about a methodology for concurrent language
development, based on denotational semantics.  We propose
carefully designed continuation structures for various
traditional concurrent control concepts, or for more complex
constructs such as remote object (process) destruction and
cloning.  We show that, by using the CSC technique, a simple
relation can be established between the structure of
continuations and the control flow constructs of the language
under study.  Using monads and the lazy functional
programming language Haskell, we show how to obtain semantic
interpreters for concurrent languages, capable of producing
either one or all possible execution traces of a program.

[joint work with Eneia Todoran, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca]

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Upcoming Events:

# Wed 4/23 Bryan Chadwick: Functional Adaptive Programming with DemeterF

We are otherwise open.  Come give a talk!

--Mitch