[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
11:45-1:30
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)


Derek Dreyer
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)

Mixin' Up the ML Module System

Abstract:

ML modules provide hierarchical namespace management, as well as
fine-grained control over the propagation of type information, but
they do not allow modules to be broken up into mutually recursive,
separately compilable components.  Mixin modules facilitate recursive
linking of separately compiled components, but they are not
hierarchically composable and typically do not support type
abstraction.  We synthesize the complementary advantages of these two
mechanisms in a novel module system design we call MixML.

A MixML module is like an ML structure in which some of the components
are specified but not defined.  In other words, it unifies the ML
structure and signature languages into one.  MixML seamlessly
integrates hierarchical composition, translucent ML-style data
abstraction, and mixin-style recursive linking.  Moreover, the design
of MixML is clean and minimalist; it emphasizes how all the salient,
semantically interesting features of the ML module system (as well as
several proposed extensions to it) can be understood simply as
stylized uses of a small set of orthogonal underlying constructs, with
mixin composition playing a central role.

This is joint work with Andreas Rossberg.

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Upcoming Events:

# 2/4 Ranjit Jhala (UCSD)
# 2/25 Christian Skalka (Univ. of VT)

Who else would like to give a talk?

--Mitch