[Colloq] Thesis Proposal by Stephen Chang Thursday September 27th at 1:30pm

[Nicole Bekerian]

The College of Computer and Information Science presents:

Thesis Proposal by Stephen Chang
Date/Time: Thursday September 27th, 2012 at 1:30pm
Location: 366 WVH

Thesis title: Laziness By Need

Abstract:

Nearly every modern programming language supports some form of lazy evaluation. This is because laziness offers many benefits that these languages can capture via lazy constructors. For example, the use of lazy streams can simplify the composition of components and improve the performance of a program. Unfortunately, lazy programming is not as simple as just using a streams library, for example. Often employing laziness in one part of a program demands additional laziness in several other parts of the program to achieve proper lazy behavior. Thus the manual insertion of lazy constructs is tedious for the most part, challenging in a few instances, and hence truly error-prone.

In this proposal, we present a semantics-based refactoring that helps strict programmers manage manual lazy programming via standard delay and force constructs. The refactoring uses a static analysis to identify the points where forces and additional delays are needed to achieve the desired simplification and performance benefits, once the programmer has added some initial lazy data constructors. The proposal presents a correctness argument for the underlying transformations and some preliminary experiences with a prototype tool implementation.



Thesis committee:

Matthias Felleisen (Advisor)
Amal Ahmed
Eli Barzilay
David Van Horn
Greg Morrisett (External examiner, Harvard University)


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Best, 
Nicole 

______________________________________________________________ 

Nicole Bekerian 
Administrative Assistant 

Northeastern University 
College of Computer and Information Science 
360 Huntington Ave. 
202 West Village H 
Boston, MA 02115 

Phone: 617.373.2462 
Fax: 617.373.5121