Generic and Indexed Programming
Jeremy Gibbons, Meng Wang and Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira abstract
The EPSRC-funded Generic and Indexed Programming project will explore the inter- action between datatype-generic programming (DGP) —- programs parametrized by the shape of their data —- and indexed programming (IP) —- lightweight dependently- typed programming, with programs indexed by type-level representations of proper- ties. Integrating these two notions will provide new ways for programmers to capture abstractions. The project builds on insights from our recent work in DGP, which has investi- gated both programming techniques (including reasoning about generic programs, and using them to capture design patterns precisely), and language mechanisms (particularly lightweight approaches: patterns for simulating highly-expressive tech- niques in familiar but apparently less-expressive languages). Firstly, these lightweight techniques, which we have been embedding in Haskell's still relatively expressive type system, are in fact applicable to even less expressive but more popular main- stream languages such as Java and C#. Secondly, the techniques are more applicable than we first thought; in particular, they offer a solution to the so-called "expression problem": safe combination of independent extensions along multiple dimensions. Thirdly, there is a synergy between DGP and IP: DGP makes IP more appealing, because the effort of stating properties can be amortized over more programs; IP provides a mechanism for DGP, because the indices can be representations of data?s shape.
infobook title | Trends in Functional Programming (TFP 2007) |
editor | Marco T. Morazan and Henrik Nilsson |
location | New York, USA |
month | April |
year | 2007 |
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