Embedded interpreters

Benton, Nick

doi:10.1017/s0956796804005398

Cited by 31 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 55 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The work most directly related to ours is Benton's "Embedded Interpreters" [6], which lays out a method for embedding interpreters into statically typed languages using type-indexed embeddings and projections (the same method was also discovered independently by Ramsey [39]). His work considers only the asymmetric case where a typed host language embeds an untyped language, and focuses on implementation rather than formal techniques.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…A more natural way to pass values between our Scheme and ML models, suggested many times in the literature (e.g., [6,35,39]) is to use a type-directed strategy to convert ML numbers to equivalent Scheme numbers and ML functions to equivalent Scheme functions (for some suitable notion of equivalence) and vice versa. We call this the natural embedding.…”

Section: The Natural Embeddingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Operational semantics for multi-language programs

Matthews

Findler

2007

SIGPLAN Not.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Inter-language interoperability is big business, as the success of Microsoft's .NET and COM and Sun's JVM show. Programming language designers are designing programming languages that reflect that fact -SML#, Mondrian, and Scala, to name just a few examples, all treat interoperability with other languages as a central design feature. Still, current multi-language research tends not to focus on the semantics of interoperation features, but only on how to implement them efficiently. In this paper, we take first steps toward higher-level models of interoperating systems. Our technique abstracts away the low-level details of interoperability like garbage collection and representation coherence, and lets us focus on semantic properties like type-safety and observable equivalence.Beyond giving simple expressive models that are natural compositions of single-language models, our studies have uncovered several interesting facts about interoperability. For example, higherorder contracts naturally emerge as the glue to ensure that interoperating languages respect each other's type systems. While we present our results in an abstract setting, they shed light on real multi-language systems and tools such as the JNI, SWIG, and Haskell's stable pointers.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: The Natural Embeddingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operational semantics for multi-language programs

Matthews

Findler

2007

SIGPLAN Not.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A more useful way to pass values between our Scheme and ML models, suggested many times in the literature (e.g., [Benton 2005;Ramsey 2003;Ohori and Kato 1993]) is to use a type-directed strategy to convert ML numbers to equivalent Scheme numbers and ML functions to equivalent Scheme functions (for some suitable notion of equivalence) and vice versa. We call this the natural embedding.…”

Section: The Natural Embeddingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The work most directly related to ours is the type-indexed embedding and projection technique described by both Ramsey [Ramsey 2003] and Benton [Benton 2005], which can be thought of as an implementation of the natural embedding we describe in Section 3. Ramsey and Benton only consider the asymmetric case where a typed host language embeds an untyped language, and focus on implementation rather than formal techniques.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operational semantics for multi-language programs

Matthews

Findler

2009

ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Interoperability is big business, a fact to which .NET, the JVM, and COM can attest. Language designers are well aware of this, and they are designing programming languages that reflect it-for instance, SML.NET, F#, Mondrian, and Scala all treat interoperability as a central design feature. Still, current multi-language research tends not to focus on the semantics of these features, but only on how to implement them efficiently. In this article, we attempt to rectify that by giving a technique for specifying the operational semantics of a multi-language system as a composition of the models of its constituent languages. Our technique abstracts away the low-level details of interoperability like garbage collection and representation coherence, and lets us focus on semantic properties like type-safety, equivalence, and termination behavior. In doing so it allows us to adapt standard theoretical techniques such as subject-reduction, logical relations, and operational equivalence for use on multi-language systems. Generally speaking, our proofs of properties in a multi-language context are mutually referential versions of their single language counterparts.We demonstrate our technique with a series of strategies for embedding a Scheme-like language into an ML-like language. We start by connecting very simple languages with a very simple strategy, and work our way up to languages that interact in sophisticated ways and have sophisticated features such as polymorphism and effects. Along the way, we prove relevant results such as typesoundness and termination for each system we present using adaptations of standard techniques.Beyond giving simple expressive models, our studies have uncovered several interesting facts about interoperability. For example, higher-order function contracts naturally emerge as the glue to ensure that interoperating languages respect each other's type systems. Our models also predict that the embedding strategy where foreign values are opaque is as expressive as the embedding strategy where foreign values are translated to corresponding values in the other language, and we were able to experimentally verify this behavior using PLT Scheme's foreign function interface.

show abstract

“…By denotational we mean that it is compositionally defined on the syntax and by operational we mean that it can be effectively presented and can form a basis for compilation [13]. This feature was apparent from the earliest presentations of game semantics [18] and is not very surprising, although the operational aspects are less perspicuous than in interpretations based on process calculi or GOI, which quickly found applications in compiler [21] or interpreter [2] development and optimisation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abstract Machines for Game Semantics, Revisited

Fredriksson

Ghica

2013

2013 28th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

machines for game semantics, revisited * Olle Fredriksson and Dan R. Ghica University of Birmingham, UK March 28, 2018Abstract We define new abstract machines for game semantics which correspond to networks of conventional computers, and can be used as an intermediate representation for compilation targeting distributed systems. This is achieved in two steps. First we introduce the HRAM, a Heap and Register Abstract Machine, an abstraction of a conventional computer, which can be structured into HRAM nets, an abstract point-to-point network model. HRAMs are multi-threaded and subsume communication by tokens (cf. IAM) or jumps. Game Abstract Machines (GAM), are HRAMs with additional structure at the interface level, but no special operational capabilities. We show that GAMs cannot be naively composed, but composition must be mediated using appropriate HRAM combinators. HRAMs are flexible enough to allow the representation of game models for languages with state (non-innocent games) or concurrency (non-alternating games). We illustrate the potential of this technique by implementing a toy distributed compiler for ICA, a higher-order programming language with shared state concurrency, thus significantly extending our previous distributed PCF compiler. We show that compilation is sound and memorysafe, i.e. no (distributed or local) garbage collection is necessary. IntroductionOne of the most profound discoveries in theoretical computer science is the fact that logical and computational phenomena can be subsumed by relatively simple communication protocols. This understanding came independently from Girard's work on the Geometry of Interaction (GOI) [16] and Milner's work on process calculi [22], and had a profound influence on the subsequent development of game semantics (see [12] for a historical survey). Of the three, game semantics proved to be particularly effective at producing precise mathematical models for a large variety of programming languages, solving a long-standing open problem concerning higher-order sequential computation [1,19]. * An extended abstract of this paper is due

show abstract

Embedded interpreters

Cited by 31 publications

References 55 publications

Operational semantics for multi-language programs

Operational semantics for multi-language programs

Operational semantics for multi-language programs

Abstract Machines for Game Semantics, Revisited

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About