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Content archived on 2024-05-07

Semantics for control with recursion

Objective



Research objectives and content
Continuations provide access to the control flow in functional programming languages and therefore bring the power of jumps into functional programming. My goal is to give an appropriate semantics for this desirable language feature, where the language also has means to express general recursion, as do all general-purpose programming languages. The main challenge consists in considering continuations and recursion at the same time. There is growing evidence that certain categorical structures are appropriate for modelling languages with these features, which makes these structures the main focus of my research.
Training content (objective, benefit and expected impact)
I became interested in functional programming languages and semantics while I studied Informatics at the University of Erlangen. The Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science in Edinburgh is an outstanding research institute in the area of semantics, as well as concurrency, applied category theory and more. As expected, I am profiting a lot from the available courses and discussions with leading researchers in my area of interest.
Links with industry / industrial relevance (22)
Industry has long term problems relating to the complexity of the definitions of programming languages currently in use. These definitions are long, unmanageable and open to divergent interpretations. This leads to incompatibilities across different implementations of the same language. The added cost to industry of these problems is significant and rising as languages become more complex. The work in this proposal aims to provide the basis for a uniform and modular account of a wide variety of programming language features. Eventually this work could have a significant impact on the definition and standardisation process for industrially relevant programming languages.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

RGI - Research grants (individual fellowships)

Coordinator

University of Edinburgh
EU contribution
No data
Address
Mayfield Road
EH9 3JZ Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Total cost
No data