archives

The Design and Implementation of a Dataflow Language for Scriptable Debugging

The Design and Implementation of a Dataflow Language for Scriptable Debugging, Guillaume Marceau, Gregory H. Cooper, Jonathan P. Spiro, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and Steven P. Reiss.

Debugging is a laborious, manual activity that often involves the repetition of common operations. Ideally, users should be able to describe these repetitious operations as little programs. Debuggers should therefore be programmable, or scriptable. The operating environment of these scripts, however, imposes interesting design challenges on the programming language in which these scripts are written.

This paper presents our design of a language for scripting debuggers. The language offers powerful primitives that can precisely and concisely capture many important debugging and comprehension metaphors. The paper also describes a pair of debuggers, one for Java and the other for Scheme, built in accordance with these principles. The paper includes concrete examples of applying this debugger to programs.

We've seen a paper on compiling dataflow languages, so here's one on an interesting application.

LISP implementation for mobile phones?

I'm looking for LISP (or Scheme) implementations for mobile devices (Symbian, Linux, Windows Mobile, etc.). Is anyone aware of any projects or vendors who cover this area?

Effects in Types

I am interested in differentiating between functions with side-effects and functions without side-effects in a type-system. Does any suggestions on papers I should read, or keywords I should search for? [Edit: apart from monads]

Thanks in advance!