Related papers: Fundamental Constructs in Programming Languages

Operational semantics has established itself as a flexible but rigorous means to describe the meaning of programming languages. Oftentimes, it is felt necessary to keep a semantics small, for example to facilitate its use for model checking…

We present a novel approach to construction of a formal semantics for a programming language. Our approach, using a parametric denotational semantics, allows the semantics to be easily extended to support new language features, and…

Monads are a popular tool for the working functional programmer to structure effectful computations. This paper presents polymonads, a generalization of monads. Polymonads give the familiar monadic bind the more general type forall a,b. L a…

Recursive definitions of predicates are usually interpreted either inductively or coinductively. Recently, a more powerful approach has been proposed, called flexible coinduction, to express a variety of intermediate interpretations,…

Categorical semantics of type theories are often characterized as structure-preserving functors. This is because in category theory both the syntax and the domain of interpretation are uniformly treated as structured categories, so that we…

This thesis develops the translation between category theory and computational linguistics as a foundation for natural language processing. The three chapters deal with syntax, semantics and pragmatics. First, string diagrams provide a…

We present a marriage of functional and structured imperative programming that embeds in pure lambda calculus. We describe how we implement the core of this language in a monadic DSL which is structurally equivalent to our intended source…

Probabilistic programming is considered as a framework, in which basic components of cognitive architectures can be represented in unified and elegant fashion. At the same time, necessity of adopting some component of cognitive…

Consensus is an often occurring problem in concurrent and distributed programming. We present a programming language with simple semantics and build-in support for consensus in the form of communicating transactions. We motivate the need…

Design patterns are distilled from many real systems to catalog common programming practice. However, some object-oriented design patterns are distorted or overly complicated because of the lack of supporting programming language constructs…

Applicative functors are a generalisation of monads. Both allow the expression of effectful computations into an otherwise pure language, like Haskell. Applicative functors are to be preferred to monads when the structure of a computation…

The functional programming paradigm has a long and storied history, with its beginnings in the Lambda Calculus. In recent decades, pure functional languages such as Haskell have been shown to be highly effective in producing robust software…

We discuss various formalisms to describe string-to-string transformations. Many are based on automata and can be seen as operational descriptions, allowing direct implementations when the input scanner is deterministic. Alternatively, one…

Pawns is a programming language under development which supports pure functional programming (including algebraic data types, higher order programming and parametric polymorphism) and imperative programming (including pointers, destructive…

Functionals are an important research subject in Mathematics and Computer Science as well as a challenge in Information Technologies where the current programming paradigm states that only symbolic computations are possible on higher order…

Copatterns give functional programs a flexible mechanism for responding to their context, and composition can greatly enhance their expressiveness. However, that same expressive power makes it harder to precisely specify the behavior of…

This paper analyses the security contribution of typical functional-language features by examining them in the light of accepted information security principles. Imperative and functional code are compared to illustrate various cases. In…

The functional interpretation is a systematic, syntactic method for transforming certain non-constructive proofs into constructive proofs with explicit bounds. We illustrate the interpretation by working through a concrete, fairly simple…

An attempt at unifying logic and functional programming is reported. As a starting point, we take the view that "logic programs" are not about logic but constitute inductive definitions of sets and relations. A skeletal language design…

Synchronous languages rely on formal methods to ease the development of applications in an efficient and reusable way. Formal methods have been advocated as a means of increasing the reliability of systems, especially those which are safety…