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Full-Text Articles in Programming Languages and Compilers

A Semantics Comparison Workbench For A Concurrent, Asynchronous, Distributed Programming Language, Claudio Corrodi, Alexander Heußner, Christopher M. Poskitt Nov 2017

A Semantics Comparison Workbench For A Concurrent, Asynchronous, Distributed Programming Language, Claudio Corrodi, Alexander Heußner, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A number of high-level languages and libraries have been proposed that offer novel and simple to use abstractions for concurrent, asynchronous, and distributed programming. The execution models that realise them, however, often change over time---whether to improve performance, or to extend them to new language features---potentially affecting behavioural and safety properties of existing programs. This is exemplified by SCOOP, a message-passing approach to concurrent object-oriented programming that has seen multiple changes proposed and implemented, with demonstrable consequences for an idiomatic usage of its core abstraction. We propose a semantics comparison workbench for SCOOP with fully and semi-automatic tools for analysing …


Code Coverage And Postrelease Defects: A Large-Scale Study On Open Source Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, David Lo, Julia Lawall, Nachiappan Nagappan Sep 2017

Code Coverage And Postrelease Defects: A Large-Scale Study On Open Source Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, David Lo, Julia Lawall, Nachiappan Nagappan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Testing is a pivotal activity in ensuring the quality of software. Code coverage is a common metric used as a yardstick to measure the efficacy and adequacy of testing. However, does higher coverage actually lead to a decline in postrelease bugs? Do files that have higher test coverage actually have fewer bug reports? The direct relationship between code coverage and actual bug reports has not yet been analyzed via a comprehensive empirical study on real bugs. Past studies only involve a few software systems or artificially injected bugs (mutants). In this empirical study, we examine these questions in the context …


Grace's Inheritance, James Noble, Andrew P. Black, Kim B. Bruce, Michael Homer, Timothy Jones Jan 2017

Grace's Inheritance, James Noble, Andrew P. Black, Kim B. Bruce, Michael Homer, Timothy Jones

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article is an apologia for the design of inheritance in the Grace educational programming language: it explains how the design of Grace’s inheritance draws from inheritance mechanisms in predecessor languages, and defends that design as the best of the available alternatives. For simplicity, Grace objects are generated from object constructors, like those of Emerald, Lua, and Javascript; for familiarity, the language also provides classes and inheritance, like Simula, Smalltalk and Java. The design question we address is whether or not object constructors can provide an inheritance semantics similar to classes.