November 09, 2004
GPCE researchers and their work
Here is a collection of interest research being conducted by people I met
at GPCE
Karl is interested in traceability of domain-specific knowledge through the transformation process. He also seems to have a system for creating doxygen-like documentation that is retargetable to any language.
He is interested in cross-language maintenance tools and the idea of a language-independent AST.
Stratego: Program transformation language and toolset
Worked on abc: an extensible compiler framework for AspectJ.
Presented a really interesting paper at OOPSLA entitled Concrete Syntax for Objects. It presents a system for embedded domain-specific languages. The Syntax Definition Framework (SDF) and the tool Stratego are used to choose domain-specific syntax that is then translated and assimilated into the host language. I think this approach is better than the one I have used (using Template Haskell).
All of their work is availabe at the Source Transformation Systems Workshop site
Other people I met
Has created a new language called Omega, which is seriously cool. By making only a small extension to Haskell's type system, called Equality Qualified Types, a new area in the programming language space has been illuminated. It is a language which combines aspects of functional programming and logic programming.
Ron Garcia from Indiana University is interested in embedding domain-specific languages too but via template meta-programming in C++.
Nathan Linger: one of Tim Sheard's PhD students.
Benedict Kavanagh: one of Phil Wadler's PhD students.
David Abrahams founded Boost++ Consulting and has recently written a book on template meta-programming in C++ (available at Amazon). He says, "don't give up on template meta-programming yet."
Walid Taha created MetaOCaml, which is closely based on MetaML. A master of the pedagogical method.