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Python is a popular high-level general-purpose programming language also heavily used by the scientific community. It supports a variety of different programming paradigms and is preferred by many for its ease of use. With the vision of…

Encodings or the proof of their absence are the main way to compare process calculi. To analyse the quality of encodings and to rule out trivial or meaningless encodings, they are augmented with quality criteria. There exists a bunch of…

Symbolic computation is an important approach in automated program analysis. Most state-of-the-art tools perform symbolic computation as interpreters and directly maintain symbolic data. In this paper, we show that it is feasible, and in…

In Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses, students find understanding nondeterministic finite-state and pushdown automata difficult. In many cases, this means that it is challenging for them to comprehend the operational semantics of…

Floating-point accumulation networks (FPANs) are key building blocks used in many floating-point algorithms, including compensated summation and double-double arithmetic. FPANs are notoriously difficult to analyze, and algorithms using…

In Grammatical Error Correction, systems are evaluated by the number of errors they correct. However, no one has assessed whether all error types are equally important. We provide and apply a method to quantify the importance of different…

Foundations of formal languages, as subfield of theoretical computer science, are part of typical upper secondary education curricula. There is very little research on the potential difficulties that students at this level have with this…

Critical points of an invariant function may or may not be symmetric. We prove, however, that if a symmetric critical point exists, those adjacent to it are generically symmetry breaking. This mathematical mechanism is shown to carry…

Quantum computing offers significant speedups for simulating physical, chemical, and biological systems, and for optimization and machine learning. As quantum software grows in complexity, the classical simulation of quantum computers,…

Motivated by experience in programming and in the teaching of programming, we make another assault on the longstanding problem of debugging. Having explored why debuggers are not used as widely as one might expect, especially in functional…

Variance is a popular and often necessary component of sampled aggregation queries. It is typically used as a secondary measure to ascertain statistical properties of the result such as its error. Yet, it is more expensive to compute than…

Many tools used to process programs, like compilers, analyzers, or verifiers, perform transformations on their intermediate program representation, like abstract syntax trees. Implementing such program transformations is a non-trivial task,…

The long-standing aspiration for software reuse has made astonishing strides in the past few years. Many modern software development ecosystems now come with rich sets of publicly-available components contributed by the community.…

We unify functional and logic programming by treating predicatesas functions equipped with their support: the set of inputs whose output is nonzero. Datalog, for instance, is a language of finitely supported boolean functions. Finite…

Splitting a logic program allows us to reduce the task of computing its stable models to similar tasks for its subprograms. This can be used to increase solving performance and prove program correctness. We generalize the conditions under…

Multiple testing problems arise naturally in scientific studies because of the need to capture or convey more information with more variables. The literature is enormous, but the emphasis is primarily methodological, providing numerous…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to forecasting tasks, with some works claiming these systems match or exceed human performance. In this paper, we argue that, as a community, we should be careful about such…

Compilers can specialize programs having invariants for performance improvement. Detecting program invariants that span large and complex code, however, is difficult for compilers. Traditional compilers do not perform very expensive…

When the inverse of an algorithm is well-defined -- that is, when its output can be deterministically transformed into the input producing it -- we say that the algorithm is invertible. While one can describe an invertible algorithm using a…

Optimizing floating-point arithmetic is vital because it is ubiquitous, costly, and used in compute-heavy workloads. Implementing precise optimizations correctly, however, is difficult, since developers must account for all the esoteric…