[PRL] Safely Composable Type-Specific Languages | Lambda the Ultimate

Mitchell Wand wand at ccs.neu.edu
Mon Aug 11 10:53:41 EDT 2014


Possibly interesting:

Safely Composable Type-Specific Languages

*Cyrus Omar, Darya Kurilova, Ligia Nistor, Benjamin Chung, Alex Potanin,
and Jonathan Aldrich, "Safely Composable Type-Specific Languages"
<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/ecoop14-tsls.pdf>, ECOOP14.*

Programming languages often include specialized syntax for common datatypes
(e.g. lists) and some also build in support for specific specialized
datatypes (e.g. regular expressions), but user-defined types must use
general-purpose syntax. Frustration with this causes developers to use
strings, rather than structured data, with alarming frequency, leading to
correctness, performance, security, and usability issues. Allowing library
providers to modularly extend a language with new syntax could help address
these issues. Unfortunately, prior mechanisms either limit expressiveness
or are not safely composable: individually unambiguous extensions can still
cause ambiguities when used together. We introduce type-specific languages
(TSLs): logic associated with a type that determines how the bodies of
generic literals, able to contain arbitrary syntax, are parsed and
elaborated, hygienically. The TSL for a type is invoked only when a literal
appears where a term of that type is expected, guaranteeing
non-interference. We give evidence supporting the applicability of this
approach and formally specify it with a bidirectionally typed elaboration
semantics for the Wyvern programming language.


http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5018
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