[Pl-seminar] 10/2: Barry Jay, "Generic Queries"

[Vincent St-Amour]

NUPRL Seminar presents

Barry Jay
University of Technology Sydney

11:45 - 1:30
Wednesday, 10/2
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Generic Queries

Generic queries can be uniformly applied to arbitrary data structures, 
be they pairs or lists or some sort of tree, without prior knowledge of 
the types of the structures involved. This talk will survey three ways 
to support them in confluent rewriting systems. Pattern calculus 
supports generic queries of arbitrary data structures, but cannot query 
functions (lambda abstractions). Factorisation calculus improves upon 
traditional combinatory logic  by being able to query any closed normal 
form, including the translation of a lambda abstraction to a combinator. 
Our current work, on boa calculus, improves on this by fully supporting 
abstractions, but with the option of conversion to combinatory form 
after reducing the body of the abstraction.  We have also developed an 
abstract machine, the ATAM, for boa calculus, which supports strong 
reduction of closures and thunks prior to their factorisation.