SICSA DVF Ron Garcia "Abstracting Gradual Typing" - SICSA - The Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance

Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/08/2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Location
The University of Strathclyde

SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow Associate Professor Ron Garcia from the University of British Columbia is visiting the University of Strathclyde Thursday 9th August 2018.

Abstract:
Language researchers and designers have extended a wide variety of type systems to support gradual typing, which enables languages to seamlessly combine dynamic and static checking. These efforts consistently demonstrate that designing a satisfactory gradual counterpart to a static type system is challenging, and this challenge only increases with the sophistication of the type system. Gradual type system designers need more formal tools to help them conceptualize, structure, and evaluate their designs.

We propose a new formal foundation for gradual typing, drawing on principles from abstract interpretation to give gradual types a semantics in terms of pre-existing static types. Abstracting Gradual

Typing (AGT for short) provides a uniform account for a variety of concepts that have typically been developed through intuition and ad hoc reasoning.

Bio:

Ronald Garcia is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. His research investigates how fundamental concepts in the theory, implementation, and practice of

programming languages can improve the software development process. His research has focused on static and dynamic type-based reasoning, metaprogramming, and generic programming