When: Thursday, May 20, 3:30 p.m.- 5:00 p.m.

Where: 8220 Wean Hall

Peter Sewell

POP Seminar

Abstract:
This talk is on the design of programming languages for distributed computation, focusing on support for type-safe marshalling of arbitrary language values. I'll discuss the design space and describe our ongoing work on an experimental language, Acute, which collects a coherent set of design choices. Acute extends an ML fragment with marshalling and versions, it has a complete semantic definition (of typing, compilation, and runtime), and an implementation. The main features are: (1) unmarshalling can involve rebinding to local resources; (2) values of abstract types can be communicated, and a globally-coherent notion of type equality ensures that unmarshalling respects abstraction; and (3) interoperation between separately-built programs with different versions of shared modules is supported, with fine-grain version control. Host: Bob Harper

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