Lambda the Ultimate

This is more of a meta usability issue than a substantive one, but I think it might concern a number of us, so at the risk of straying too far off topic, here goes:

Up until now I've been killing a lot of trees printing out PL research papers, most of which are distributed as two column PDF's in ACM conference paper format.

I would much rather load them all into a Sony Reader or similar device so I could keep my entire technical library with me on a memory card.

Unfortunately, these PDF's aren't in "Tagged PDF" format, which is to say that they aren't annotated with structural meta data that would let a mobile device "re-flow" them for display on a small screen.

Has anyone figured out a way, short of buying an expensive copy of the full Acrobat publishing software, to automatically add this tagging meta data to our papers or to otherwise strip out two column formatting from PDFs so they could be viewed at a reasonable size in landscape mode without having to read the top left column, scroll down to the bottom half of the left column, then back up to see the top of the right column, and then back down again to see the bottom right quadrant of the page?

Maybe we could all agree on some sort of secondary raw text, rtf, or XML-based distribution format that would be more amennable to use on mobile devices. The fixed page size two column layout served us well in the age of print, but in an age of digital paper and e-ink it seems a tad sub-optimal.

First Class Relationships in an Object-oriented Language, by Gavin Bierman and Alisdair Wren, was a paper published at ECOOP 2005.

They show how to add relationships as a first-class mechanism to a Java-like language, where by relationships in something like the UML sense. Cribbing from their examples, you might have a Student class and a Course class, and an Attends relationship, which is a binary relation between Students and Courses. Then, there are mechanisms to dynamically add and remove entries from a relationship, and to query a relationship about whether particular objects are in them or not.

Now my personal random editorialisation: I think this is a really interesting idea, because these kinds of things pops up all the time in OO models, and having relations be first class means that you can move some state out of individual object instances, which is always a good thing, and the type system can guarantee something about what relationships will hold. The things that scare me about this idea are first, that you can potentially add a lot of heap pressure by keeping objects live longer, and second, that you now have much more pervasive aliasing of objects in your program. I don't know if these are real problems though, and anyway the feature is cool enough that I'd be interested in programming in a language with support for it, just to see what it's like.

I don't know if this question is within the bounds of LTU, but this thread is kinda close so I think it might be okay (if not please delete). My situation is I'm an undergrad, and I want to go on to a good ph.d program and eventually do research and teach. I'm interested in domain specific languages, parallizing compilers, and PL theory. I was hoping some of the academic folks here could advise me.

My problem is that the CS dept at my school is very weak in plt. It's a decent school (I'd say middian level state univerisity), but the dept strength is in networking. From the thread above I've read some documents about grad school, and as you'd expect, to get into a good ph.d program it's good to have some research experience as an undergrad.

So given my situation, does anyone have any advice for me? Switching schools isn't an option (right now) due to my work as a legacy system maintainer paying too well to leave just yet. I spoke with the Dept head and he didn't have any ideas. Thanks in advance...

I have posted a near final draft (in PDF and PS format) of my paper on the semantics of Cat at http://www.cat-language.com/paper.html, and I wanted to make a public request for comments.

Here is the abstract:

Cat: A Typed Functional Stack Based Language

Stack-based application languages, such as Forth and Postscript,
traditionally have provided little or no support for functional programming and have lacked a formal static type system. This changed when Manfred von Thun introduced Joy, a functional stack-based language,
and Stephan Becher provided an implementation of StrongForth, a
dialect of Forth with an informal type system. This paper introduces
the semantics and type system for a pure functional programming
language which is entirely stack based.

By the way Lambda-the-Ultimate.org is already acknowledged for the boundless help everyone has provided me so far. Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I am having trouble being creative. I am trying to find alternative visualizations for dataflow languages that would allow a programmer to program as quickly and efficiently as a text-based language. A diagram is just not productive enough for serious coding. Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas on how to do this?

My end goal is to find a language that can represent non-linear, conditional sequential execution for imperative languages in a way that is continuous without having to diagram like a dataflow language does.