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Gilad Bracha on "Atomic Install"Atomic Install from Bracha's blog. I'm happy to see people talking about this, mostly because it's a pet topic of mine. I think too much ink has been spilled trying to shoehorn "dynamic languages" (by which I mean the usual suspects: Smalltalk-esque, mostly, and Python, PHP, etc.) into the vocabulary and mindset of type theory. Meanwhile, the operational model of these languages is really fundamentally different, and they are mostly quite similar: the semantics defines some run-time data model for programs, and then the program updates that model, usually in a fairly straightforward procedural way. In this sense, most of these languages can really be viewed as data description languages in disguise. Ruby is a great example of this: all of it's OO constructs are best viewed as syntactic sugar (semantic sugar?) over a fairly simple set of hashtable updates. (Of course, the runtime data model may be abstract, as in JIT compiled code, and the runtime may not need to actually build and maintain it in a naive way, but that's hidden from the programmer.) Anyway, given the above, it has for a long time struck me that a better direction for providing safety and static checking in such languages may be to borrow techniques from transaction processing. One might define suitable notions of data consistency and then insist that at particular semantic checkpoints, those consistency properties are guaranteed to hold. Atomic install is exactly what one such a mechanism might look like. Is there work in the PL literature on this topic? By Matt Hellige at 2009-11-02 23:47 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 5076 reads
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