Interpretation is an implicit part of today’s programming; it has great power but is overused and has significant costs. For example, interpreters are typically significantly hard to understand and hard to reason about. The methodology of “Totally Functional Programming” (TFP) is a reasoned attempt to redress the problem of interpretation. It incorporates an awareness of the undesirability of interpretation with observations that definitions and a certain style of programming appear to offer alternatives to it. Application of TFP is expected to lead to a number of significant outcomes, theoretical as well as practical. Primary among these are novel programming languages to lessen or eliminate the use of interpretation in programming, leading to better-quality software. However, TFP contains a number of lacunae in its current formulation, which hinder development of these outcomes. Among others, formal semantics and type-systems for TFP languages are yet to be discovered, the means to reduce interpretation in programs is to be determined, and a detailed explication is needed of interpretation, definition, and the differences between the two. Most important of all however is the need to develop a complete understanding of the nature of interpretation. In this work, suitable type-systems for TFP languages are identified, and guidance given regarding the construction of appropriate formal semantics. Techniques, based around the ‘fold’ operator, are identified and developed for modifying programs so as to reduce the amount of interpretation they contain. Interpretation as a means of language-extension is also investigated. Finally, the nature of interpretation is considered. Numerous hypotheses relating to it considered in detail. Combining the results of those analyses with discoveries from elsewhere in this work leads to the proposal that interpretation is not, in fact, symbol-based computation, but is in fact something more fundamental: computation that varies with input. We discuss in detail various implications of this characterisation, including its practical application. An often more-useful property, ‘inherent interpretiveness’, is also motivated and discussed in depth. Overall, our inquiries act to give conceptual and theoretical foundations for practical TFP.

Thesis (M.Sc.). / Written for the Dept. of Computer Science. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2007/08/30). Includes bibliographical references.

Functional programming has long been used in academia, but has historically seen little light in industry, where imperative programming languages have been dominating. This is quickly changing in web development, where the functional paradigm is increasingly being adopted. While programming languages on other platforms than the web are constantly competing, in a sort of survival of the fittest environment, on the web the platform is determined by the browsers which today only support JavaScript. JavaScript which was made in 10 days is not well suited for building large applications. A popular approach to cope with this is to write the application in another language and then compile the code to JavaScript. Today this is possible to do in a number of established languages such as Java, Clojure, Ruby etc. but also a number of special purpose language has been created These are languages that are made for building front-end web applications. One such language is Elm which embraces the principles of functional programming. In many real life situation Elm might not be possible to use, so in this report we are going to look at how to bring the benefits seen in Elm to JavaScript.

In this paper I present the domain specific language HaGPipe for graphics programming in Haskell. HaGPipe has a clean, purely functional and strongly typed interface and targets the whole graphics pipeline including the programmable shaders of the GPU. It can be extended for use with various backends and this paper provides two different ones. The first one generates vertex and fragment shaders in Cg for the GPU, and the second one generates vertex shader code for the SPUs on PlayStation 3. I will demonstrate HaGPipe's many capabilities of producing optimized code, including an extensible rewrite rule framework, automatic packing of vertex data, common sub expression elimination and both automatic basic block level vectorization and loop vectorization through the use of structures of arrays.

There are many problems where the solution depends heavily on parametertuning and therefore on conguration. Examples include Hill Climbers andvarious Evolutionary Algorithms. The Intelligent Parameter Utilization Tool(InPUT) uses a cross-language format for describing congurations of computerexperiments, thereby aiding in documentation and communication. Itis implemented in Java, and a C++ version is being developed. This meansthat only implementations in statically typed languages currently exist. APython port would thus greatly increase the diversity of implementation languages.The goal of this project was to create an InPUT implementation inPython, and to explore the suitability of a dynamically typed language inthis context. A de facto specication was discovered by creating a suite oflearning tests, and the new implementation was developed using a test-drivenapproach. Several features of Python proved advantageous by simplifying thedevelopment process.

Agda is a dependently-typed programming language and theorem prover, supporting proof construction in a functional programming style. Due to its incredibly flexible concrete syntax and support for Unicode identifiers, Agda can be used to construct elegant and expressive proofs in a format that is understandable even to those unfamiliar with the tool. However, the semantics of Agda is lacking resource guarantees of the kind that Haskell programmers are used to with lazy evaluation, where multiple uses of function arguments and let-bound variables still result in the corresponding expressions to be evaluated at most once. With the current compiler backends of Agda, a mathematically-natural way to structure programs therefore frequently results in inefficient compiled programs, where the run-time complexity can be exponentional in cases where corresponding Haskell code executes in linear time. This makes a highly-optimised compiler backend a particularly essential tool for practical development with Agda. The main contributions of this thesis are a series of compiler optimisations that inlines simple projections, removes some expressions with trivial evaluations that can be statically inferred, and reduces the need for repeated evaluations of the same expressions by increasing sharing. We developed transformations that focus on the inherent “loss” of sharing that is frequently the result of compiling Agda programs. Where an Agda developer may imagine that value sharing should exist in the generated Haskell code, it often does not. We present several optimising transformations that re-introduce some of this “lost” sharing without affecting the type-theoretic semantics, then apply these optimisations to several typical Agda applications to examine the memory allocation and execution time effects. In measuring the effects of these optimisations on Agda code we show that overall improvements in runtime on the order of 10-20% are possible. We hope that the development and discussion of these optimisations is useful to the Agda developer community, and may be helpful for future contributors interested in implementing new optimisations for Agda. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Programming resource-sensitive systems, such as real-time embedded systems, requires guaranteeing both the functional correctness of computations and also that time and space usage fits within constraints imposed by hardware limits or the environment. Functional programming languages have proved very good at meeting the former logical kind of guarantees but not the latter resource guarantees. This thesis contributes to demonstrate the applicability of functional programming in resource-sensitive systems with an automatic program analysis for obtaining guaranteed upper bounds on dynamic space usage of functional programs. Our analysis is developed for a core subset of Hume, a domain-specific functional language targeting resource-sensitive systems (Hammond et al. 2007), and presented as a type and effect system that builds on previous sized type systems (Hughes et al. 1996, Chin and Khoo 2001) and effect systems for costs (Dornic et al. 1992, Reistad and Giord 1994, Hughes and Pareto 1999). It extends previous approaches by using abstract interpretation techniques to automatically infer linear approximations of the sizes of recursive data types and the stack and heap costs of recursive functions. The correctness of the analysis is formally proved with respect to an operational semantics for the language and an inference algorithm that automatically reconstructs size and cost bounds is presented. A prototype implementation of the analysis and operational semantics has been constructed and used to experimentally assess the quality of the cost bounds with some examples, including implementations of textbook functional programming algorithms and simplified embedded systems.

Constructs for functional and logic programming can be smoothly integrated into an existing object-oriented language. We demonstrate this in the context of C++ (a statically-typed object-oriented language with effects and parametric polymorphism) via two libraries: FC++ and LC++. FC++ is a library for functional programming in C++; FC++ supports higher-order polymorphic functions, lazy lists, and a small lambda language; it also contains a large library of useful functions, datatypes, combinators, and monads. LC++ is a library for logic programming in C++; LC++ provides the same general functionality as Prolog, including the ability to return query results lazily (one at a time). Both libraries are embedded in C++ so that they share C++'s static type system, and the library interfaces provide straightforward ways for code from within one paradigm to ``call out' to another. Our work describes the techniques used to implement these libraries in C++ and shows that the resulting multiparadigm language has useful applications in real-world domains. We also describe how many of the implementation techniques can be generalized from C++ and applied to other programming languages to yield similar results.

Experimental game theory is the use of game theoretic abstractions—games, players, and strategies—in experiments and simulations. It is often used in cases where traditional, analytical game theory fails or is difficult to apply. This thesis collects three previously published papers that provide domain-specific language (DSL) support for defining and executing these experiments, and for explaining their results. Despite the widespread use of software in this field, there is a distinct lack of tool support for common tasks like modeling games and running simulations. Instead, most experiments are created from scratch in general-purpose programming languages. We have addressed this problem with Hagl, a DSL embedded in Haskell that allows the concise, declarative definition of games, strategies, and executable experiments. Hagl raises the level of abstraction for experimental game theory, reducing the effort to conduct experiments and freeing experimenters to focus on hard problems in their domain instead of low-level implementation details. While analytical game theory is most often used as a prescriptive tool, a way to analyze a situation and determine the best course of action, experimental game theory is often applied descriptively to explain why agents interact and behave in a certain way. Often these interactions are complex and surprising. To support this explanatory role, we have designed visual DSL for explaining the interaction of strategies for iterated games. This language is used as a vehicle to introduce the notational quality of traceability and the new paradigm of explanation-oriented programming. / Graduation date: 2012

Functional logic languages provide a powerful programming paradigm combining the features of functional languages and logic languages. However, current implementations of functional logic languages are complex, slow, or both. This thesis presents a scheme, called the Basic Scheme, for compiling and executing functional logic languages based on non-deterministic graph rewriting. This thesis also describes the implementation and optimization of a prototype of the Basic Scheme. The prototype is simple and performs well compared to other current implementations.