Colloquium Details
Programming with Types
| Author: | Stephanie Weirich Cornell University |
|---|---|
| Date: | February 15, 2002 |
| Time: | 10:00 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
Note: Special Day and Time
Abstract
Run-time type analysis is an increasingly important linguistic mechanism in modern programming languages. In run-time systems it is used to implement services such as accurate garbage collection, serialization, cloning and structural equality. Component frameworks rely on it to provide reflection mechanisms in order to discover and and interact with program interfaces at run-time. This ability is crucial in the design of large, distributed systems that must be flexible and robust enough to support frequent updates of new code and of new forms of data.
However, existing language support for run-time type analysis was designed for simple type systems and does not scale well to the sophisticated types of modern and next-generation programming languages. These languages include problematic type constructs such as first-class abstract types, recursive types, and objects. They also include a compile-time language to describe type parameterization. In this talk, I will show how the idea of interpreting that compile-time language at run time yields an expressive and elegant mechanism for describing type-directed operations.
Biography
Stephanie Weirich is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University and her B.A. in Computer Science from Rice University. Her main research interests include programming languages, type theory, dynamic type analysis, functional programming, metaprogramming and language-based security.