Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Grace Programming Language Draft Specification Version 0.3.53, Andrew P. Black, Kim B. Bruce, James Noble

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is a specification of the Grace Programming Language. This specification is notably incomplete and everything is subject to change. In particular, this version does not address the library, nested static type system, module system, metadata, immutable data and pure methods, and other areas. For discussion and rationale, see http://gracelang.org.

It is designed for use by university students learning programming in CS1 and CS2 classes that are based on object-oriented programming, faculty and teaching assistants developing materials for 1st and 2nd year programming classes, programming researchers needing an object-oriented programming language as a research vehicle, and programming designers in search …

Type Classes And Instance Chains: A Relational Approach, John Garrett Morris

Dissertations and Theses

Type classes, first proposed during the design of the Haskell programming language, extend standard type systems to support overloaded functions. Since their introduction, type classes have been used to address a range of problems, from typing ordering and arithmetic operators to describing heterogeneous lists and limited subtyping. However, while type class programming is useful for a variety of practical problems, its wider use is limited by the inexpressiveness and hidden complexity of current mechanisms. We propose two improvements to existing class systems. First, we introduce several novel language features, instance chains and explicit failure, that increase the expressiveness of type …

Object-Oriented Programming: Some History, And Challenges For The Next Fifty Years, Andrew P. Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Object-oriented programming is inextricably linked to the pioneering work of Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard on the design of the Simula language, which started at the Norwegian Computing Centre in the Spring of 1961. However, object-orientation, as we think of it today—fifty years later—is the result of a complex interplay of ideas, constraints and people. Dahl and Nygaard would certainly recognize it as their progeny, but might also be amazed at how much it has grown up. This article is based on a lecture given on 22nd August 2011, on the occasion of the scientific opening of the Ole-Johan …

Interactive Ambient Visualizations For Soft Advice, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Titus Barik, Andrew P. Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Some software packages offer the user soft advice: recommendations that are intended to help the user create high quality artifacts, but which may turn out to be bad advice. It is left to the user to determine whether the soft advice really will improve quality, and to decide whether or not to adopt it. Visualizations can help the user in making this decision, but we believe that conventional visualizations are less than ideal. In this paper, we describe an interactive ambient visualization to help users identify, understand and interpret soft advice.

Our visualization was developed to help programmers interpret code …

Modules And Dialects As Objects In Grace, Michael Homer, James Noble, Kim B. Bruce, Andrew P. Black

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Grace is a gradually typed, object-oriented language for use in education; consonant with that use, we have tried to keep Grace as simple and straightforward as possible. Grace needs a module system for several reasons: to teach students about modular program design, to organise large programs, especially its self-hosted implementation, to provide access to resources defined in other languages, and to support different “dialects”—language subsets, or domain specific languages, for particular parts of the curriculum. Grace already has several organising constructs; this paper describes how Grace uses two of them, objects and lexical scope, to provide modules and dialects.

The Grace Programming Language Draft Specification Version 0.3.1261, Andrew P. Black, Kim B. Bruce, James Noble

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is a specification of the Grace Programming Language. This specification is notably incomplete, and everything is subject to change.