Thu Apr 4, 2007, 4:15-5:30, 3400 Boelter Hall

Extensible Programming and Specification Languages

Eric Van Wyk
University of Minnesota

Abstract: This talk describes our research in extensible languages.
This work begins with the realization that programming languages and
programming tasks are rarely a perfect fit: a program can often be
clarified by using a number of domain-specific language features
tailored to the task at hand.  These features typically do not exist
in general purpose languages and one approach to making such
high-level features available is extensible languages.  An extensible
programming language allows a programmer to import into her extensible
host programming language the unique combination of language features
that raise the level of abstraction of the language to that of the
problem domain. These features may be (i) new language constructs or
notations describing high-level abstractions in a domain, (ii)
semantic analyses that, for example, check that the programmer has
used the new language constructs correctly, or (iii) optimizing
program transformations that rewrite a program into a more efficient
form.  This imperfect fit between languages and tasks also exists in
the realm of software specification languages and thus we are also
interested in extensibility as it applies to specification and
modeling languages.  We will cover higher-order attribute grammars
extended with forwarding; this is the underlying language processing
mechanism our extensible compiler frameworks employ to build
extensible programming and specification languages.  We also
demonstrate these ideas with prototype extensible specifications of
Java and Lustre.

Bio:
Eric Van Wyk is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and
Engineering department at the University of Minnesota.  He received
his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1998 and was a post-doctoral
researcher in the Computing Laboratory at Oxford University before
joining the University of Minnesota in 2002.  His research interests
include extensible programming and modeling languages and the
extensible compiler frameworks that implement such languages.  He is
also interested in declarative specification of program optimizations
and techniques for proving their correctness.  Dr. Van Wyk is a
2005-2007 McKnight Land-Grant Professor and a recipient of an NSF
CAREER Award.

Host: Jens Palsberg