[PRL] torture chamber tomorrow (Wed) at 11:45am

William D Clinger will at ccs.neu.edu
Tue Oct 14 14:44:09 EDT 2008


Tomorrow (Wednesday the 15th) at 11:45am in WVH 366,
Will Clinger will give a 35-minute practice talk on
the Scheme programming language.  Your criticisms
are solicited, following our usual model for torture
chambers.

The actual talk will be given on Monday, 20 October, at
the Lisp50 at OOPSLA celebration of Lisp's 50th birthday
( http://www.lisp50.org/ ).  The audience is expected
to consist primarily of Common Lispers and OOPSLA
attendees.  What follows are the advertised abstract
and bio for Will's talk.


Scheme at 33

Abstract:

Scheme began as a sequential implementation of the
Actor model, from which Scheme acquired its proper
tail recursion and first class continuations; other
consequences of its origins include lexical scoping,
first class procedures, uniform evaluation, and a
unified environment.  As Scheme developed, it spun
off important new technical ideas such as delimited
continuations and hygienic macros while enabling
research in compilers, semantics, partial evaluation,
and other areas.  Dozens of implementations support
a wide variety of users and aspirations, exerting
pressure on the processes used to specify Scheme.

Bio:

William D Clinger first encountered Lisp in 1975, in
a course on automatic theorem proving.  He has been
at Northeastern University since 1994, where most of
his research involves the design, specification, and
implementation of functional or higher-order languages.
He contributed to several of the defining reports on
Scheme, wrote the compilers for two implementations,
and invented efficient algorithms for hygienic macro
expansion, accurate decimal-to-binary conversions,
and bounded-latency generational garbage collection.


Will



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