[Pl-seminar] [pl-seminar] October 17: George Heineman - Synthesizing Solutions to the Expression Problem

[Aviral Goel]

NUPRL Seminar presents

*George Heineman*
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (https://www.wpi.edu/people/faculty/heineman
)

10:00 AM
Wednesday, October 17 2018
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

*Synthesizing Solutions to the Expression Problem*

*Abstract*

The Expression Problem (EP) describes a common software issue that appears
regardless of programming language or programming paradigm. As coined by
Philip Wadler in 1998, EP is a new name for an old problem. Given a data
type defined by cases, consider two independent extensions, namely, adding
new cases to the data type and new functions over the datatype. Dozens of
papers in the research literature present their solutions to the EP, using
a variety of programming languages and approaches.

In this talk I present a Scala-based framework that can synthesize full
solutions to the EP problem. The first step is to model the domain of
interest (such as mathematical expressions or geometric shapes) to ensure
that our synthesized code can work with any desired application domain.
Second, we demonstrate how to synthesize code that reproduces a dozen EP
solutions from the literature, in C++, Java and Haskell. We designed a
common API for all approaches, independent of programming language. While
we do not introduce any new approach for EP, we explore the challenges that
EP solutions face with binary methods and producer methods. An important
contribution of this work is the scientific reproduction of known solutions
from the literature.

This work is based on an ongoing collaboration with with Jan Bessai (TU
Dortmund) and Boris Düdder (Univ. Copenhagen).

*Bio*

George T. Heineman is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at WPI.
His research interests are in Software Engineering, specifically
synthesizing software systems from composable units. He is co-author of
"Algorithms in a Nutshell (2ed)," published by O'Reilly Media in 2016.
Aside from his professional pursuits, George is an avid puzzler. He
invented Sujiken(R), a Sudoku variation played on a right-triangle
arrangement of cells in which numbers cannot repeat in a horizontal row,
vertical column or diagonal in any direction.
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