Lambda the Ultimate

An Expressive Language of Signatures. Norman Ramsey and Kathleen Fisher and Paul Govereau. ICFP'05.

Our language includes operations for adding, renaming, and removing components; for changing the type associated with a value; for making a manifest type abstract or vice versa; and for combining two interfaces. These operations can express useful relationships among interfaces.

The authors want to help programmers express nontrivial relationships between interfaces, in order to better understand and explain the structure of complex software systems. To meet this goal they introduce new language design, with fairly rich and expressive concrete syntax.

This line of work is related to issues I wrote about. I remember Ramsey implying he is thinking about these issues in one of his web pages, and I waited to see what he would come up with. I guess this is it...

This is an important area, and I am sure there's still a lot to be done.