Lambda the Ultimate

Announcing the 2015 edition of the OBT workshop, to be co-located with POPL 2015, in Mumbai, India. Two-page paper submissions are due November 7, 2014.

From the web page (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~sc40/obt15/):

Programming language researchers have the principles, tools, algorithms and abstractions to solve all kinds of problems, in all areas of computer science. However, identifying and evaluating new problems, particularly those that lie outside the typical core PL problems we all know and love, can be a significant challenge. This workshop's goal is to identify and discuss problems that do not often show up in our top conferences, but where programming language research can make a substantial impact. We hope fora like this will increase the diversity of problems that are studied by PL researchers and thus increase our community's impact on the world.

While many workshops associated with POPL have become more like mini-conferences themselves, this is an anti-goal for OBT. The workshop will be informal and structured to encourage discussion. We are at least as interested in problems as in solutions.

I am about to make some changes to the name server definitions. Since changes take time to propagate, you may have trouble reaching the site for awhile. If this happens, try using the .com domain instead of the preferred .org domain.

In his blog, Bob Harper, in joint effort with Dave MacQueen and Lars Bergstrom, announces the launch of sml-family.org:

The Standard ML Family project provides a home for online versions of various formal definitions of Standard ML, including the "Definition of Standard ML, Revised" (Standard ML 97). The site also supports coordination between different implementations of the Standard ML (SML) programming language by maintaining common resources such as the documentation for the Standard ML Basis Library and standard test suites. The goal is to increase compatibility and resource sharing between Standard ML implementations.

The site includes a history section devoted to the history of ML, and of Standard ML in particular. This section will contain a collection of original source documents relating to the design of the language.

Logical methods in computer science just published Matija Pretnar's latest take on algebraic effects and handlers:

We present a complete polymorphic effect inference algorithm for an ML-style language with handlers of not only exceptions, but of any other algebraic effect such as input & output, mutable references and many others. Our main aim is to offer the programmer a useful insight into the effectful behaviour of programs. Handlers help here by cutting down possible effects and the resulting lengthy output that often plagues precise effect systems. Additionally, we present a set of methods that further simplify the displayed types, some even by deliberately hiding inferred information from the programmer.

Pretnar and Bauer's Eff has made previous appearances here on LtU. Apart from the new fangled polymorphic effect system, this paper also contains an Eff tutorial.

Lambda the Ultimate is now running on a new, faster, more reliable server. The old one is now, uh... pining for the fjords. This should resolve the increasingly frequent outages we've seen recently. Because the old server had started failing, we didn't have time to do as much quality control on the migration as we would have liked. If anyone notices any issues with the site, please comment in this thread. Currently known issues:

• Non-Latin UTF-8 characters apparently didn't survive the database migration correctly. This is a particular issue if you have a username containing non-Latin characters - you may not be able to log in currently.
• It's possible that some comments posted later on Monday don't appear on the new site. (Resolved: there were no missing comments)
• New user signup emails are not yet working.
• Due to DNS propagation, not everyone will see the new site immediately. (Now resolved)

The struck out issues have been resolved. The remaining issue, with user signup emails, should be resolved in the next few days.

Breaking the Complexity Barrier of Pure Functional Programs with Impure Data Structures by Pieter Wuille and Tom Schrijvers:

Pure functional programming language offer many advantages over impure languages. Unfortunately, the absence of destructive update, imposes a complexity barrier. In imperative languages, there are algorithms and data structures with better complexity. We present our project for combining existing program transformation techniques to transform inefficient pure data structures into impure ones with better complexity. As a consequence, the programmer is not exposed to the impurity and retains the advantages of purity.

This paper is along the same lines a question I asked a couple of years ago. The idea here is to allow programming using immutable interfaces, and then automatically transform it into a more efficient mutable equivalent.

Video of Stephen Wolfram showing off the Wolfram Language and sharing his perspective on the design of the language at Strange Loop conference.

Or, in other words, what's the future of Emacs Lisp (and unavoidable HN discussion).

The original message contains some interesting tidbits. I am not sure how the discussion on emacs-devel will develop. But speculating about things such as Guile elisp is, of course, our bailiwick.

In a recent LtU discussion, naasking comments that "I always thought languages that don't specify evaluation order should classify possibly effectful expressions that assume an evaluation order to be errors". Recent work on the C language has provided reasonable formal tools to reason about evaluation order for C, which has very complex evaluation-order rules.

An operational and axiomatic semantics for non-determinism and sequence points in C
Robbert Krebbers
2014

The C11 standard of the C programming language does not specify the execution order of expressions. Besides, to make more effective optimizations possible (e.g. delaying of side-effects and interleav- ing), it gives compilers in certain cases the freedom to use even more behaviors than just those of all execution orders.

Widely used C compilers actually exploit this freedom given by the C standard for optimizations, so it should be taken seriously in formal verification. This paper presents an operational and ax- iomatic semantics (based on separation logic) for non-determinism and sequence points in C. We prove soundness of our axiomatic se- mantics with respect to our operational semantics. This proof has been fully formalized using the Coq proof assistant.

One aspect of this work that I find particularly interesting is that it provides a program (separation) logic: there is a set of inference rules for a judgment of the form \(\Delta; J; R \vdash \{P\} s \{Q\}\), where \(s\) is a C statement and \(P, Q\) are logical pre,post-conditions such that if it holds, then the statement \(s\) has no undefined behavior related to expression evaluation order. This opens the door to practical verification that existing C program are safe in a very strong way (this is all validated in the Coq theorem prover).

Earlier this week Microsoft Research Cambridge organised a Festschrift for Luca Cardelli. The preface from the book:

Luca Cardelli has made exceptional contributions to the world of programming
languages and beyond. Throughout his career, he has re-invented himself every
decade or so, while continuing to make true innovations. His achievements span
many areas: software; language design, including experimental languages;
programming language foundations; and the interaction of programming languages
and biology. These achievements form the basis of his lasting scientific leadership
and his wide impact.
...
Luca is always asking "what is new", and is always looking to
the future. Therefore, we have asked authors to produce short pieces that would
indicate where they are today and where they are going. Some of the resulting
pieces are short scientific papers, or abridged versions of longer papers; others are
less technical, with thoughts on the past and ideas for the future. We hope that
they will all interest Luca.

Hopefully the videos will be posted soon.