Search Results

In teaching students to program with compositions of higher-order functions, we have encountered a sharp distinction in the difficulty of problems as perceived by students. This distinction especially matters as growing numbers of programmers learn about ...

Background and Context. Program planning has been a long-standing and important problem in computing education. Finding useful primitives for planning and assessing whether students are able to understand and use these primitives remain open problems. ...

Closures are a language feature supported by many mainstream languages, combining the ability to package up references to code blocks with the possibility of capturing state from the environment of the closure's declaration. Closures are powerful, but ...

Motivation. Higher-order functions are a standard and increasingly central component in many kinds of modern programming, including data science and Web development. Yet little research has been devoted to student learning or understanding of this ...

The Evolution of APL, the HOPL I paper by Falkoff and Iverson on APL, recounted the fundamental design principles which shaped the implementation of the APL language in 1966, and the early uses and other influences which shaped its first decade of ...

In functional programming languages, such as Scala and Haskell, a higher-order function is a function that takes one or more functions as parameters or returns a function. Using higher-order functions in programs can increase the generality and reduce ...

We present an architectural design of a library for Bayesian modelling and inference in modern functional programming languages. The novel aspect of our approach are modular implementations of existing state-of-the-art inference algorithms. Our design ...

Parser combinators are a popular approach to parsing where context-free grammars are represented as executable code. However, conventional parser combinators do not support left recursion, and can have worst-case exponential runtime. These limitations ...

We present a verification procedure for pure higher-order functional Scala programs with parametric types. We show that our procedure is sound for proofs, as well as sound and complete for counter-examples. The procedure reduces the analysis of higher-...

Modular programming and modular verification go hand in hand, but most existing logics for concurrency ignore two crucial forms of modularity: *higher-order functions*, which are essential for building reusable components, and *granularity abstraction*, ...

Assertions play an important role in the construction of robust software. Their use in programming languages dates back to the 1970s. Eiffel, an object-oriented programming language, wholeheartedly adopted assertions and developed the "Design by ...

We present a survey of control-flow analysis of functional programs, which has been the subject of extensive investigation throughout the past 30 years. Analyses of the control flow of functional programs have been formulated in multiple settings and ...

In this paper, we present a transformation that maps type-level expressions from functional higher-order, typed (HOT) languages to type-level expressions in object-oriented HOT languages by mapping higher-order types to type parameters of generics that ...

Many recent research projects focus on language support for behavioral software contracts, that is, assertions that govern the boundaries between software building blocks such as procedures, classes, or modules. Contracts primarily help locate bugs in ...

We propose a novel type-based model checking algorithm for higher-order recursion schemes. As shown by Kobayashi, verification problems of higher-order functional programs can easily be translated into model checking problems of recursion schemes. Thus, ...

Datatype-generic programs are programs that are parametrized by a datatype or type functor: whereas polymorphic programs abstract from the "integers" in "lists of integers",datatype-generic programs abstract from the "lists of". There are two main ...

Higher-order functions are essential for generic programming. While they are naturally supported in functional programming languages, there are no higher-order functions in C++. There, various function datatypes exist that simulate the effect of higher-...

Many beginning students of functional programming have difficulty understanding higher-order functions and their types. Experienced functional programmers have such a close familiarity and intuitive grasp of these crucial concepts that they may find it ...

Subtyping relations are usually defined either syntactically by a formal system or semantically by an interpretation of types into an untyped denotational model. This work shows how to define a subtyping relation semantically in the presence of Boolean ...

Semi-inversion is a generalisation of inversion: A semi-inverse of a program takes some of the inputs and outputs of the original programand returns the remaining inputs and outputs.

Previous papers by the author have described semi-inversion for a ...