Reasoning about Multi-stage Programs

Inoue, Jun; Taha, Walid

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28869-2_18

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 30 publications

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“…These systems ensure that generated programs are well typed through a mechanism similar to C++ concepts. Inoue and Taha [18] theoretically studied the problems involved in verifying multi-staged programs.…”

Section: Metaprogramming Safety and Usabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Early detection of type errors in C++ templates

Chen

Erwig

2014

Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2014 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation

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Current C++ implementations typecheck templates in two phases: Before instantiation, those parts of the template are checked that do not depend on template parameters, while the checking of the remaining parts is delayed until template instantiation time when the template arguments become available. This approach is problematic because it causes two major usability problems. First, it prevents library developers to provide guarantees about the type correctness for modules involving templates. Second, it can lead, through the incorrect use of template functions, to inscrutable error messages. Moreover, errors are often reported far away from the source of the program fault.To address this problem, we have developed a type system for Garcia's type-reflective calculus that allows a more precise characterization of types and thus a better utilization of type information within template definitions. This type system allows the static detection of many type errors that could previously only be detected after template instantiation. The additional precision and earlier detection time is achieved through the use of so-called "choice types" and corresponding typing rules that support the static reasoning about underspecified template types. The main contribution of this paper is a guarantee of the type safety of C++ templates (general definitions with specializations) since we can show that well-typed templates only generate well-typed object programs.

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Section: Metaprogramming Safety and Usabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Early detection of type errors in C++ templates

Chen

Erwig

2014

Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2014 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation

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Reasoning about Multi-stage Programs

Inoue

Taha

2012

Programming Languages and Systems

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Abstract. We settle three basic questions that naturally arise when verifying multi-stage functional programs. Firstly, does adding staging to a language compromise any equalities that hold in the base language? Unfortunately it does, and more care is needed to reason about terms with free variables. Secondly, staging annotations, as the name "annotations" suggests, are often thought to be orthogonal to the behavior of a program, but when is this formally guaranteed to be true? We give termination conditions that characterize when this guarantee holds. Finally, do multi-stage languages satisfy useful, standard extensional facts-for example, that functions agreeing on all arguments are equivalent? We provide a sound and complete notion of applicative bisimulation, which establishes such facts or, in principle, any valid program equivalence. These results greatly improve our understanding of staging, and allow us to prove the correctness of quite complicated multi-stage programs.

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Reasoning about multi-stage programs

Inoue¹,

Taha²

2016

J. Funct. Prog.

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We settle three basic questions that naturally arise when verifying code generators written in multi-stage functional programming languages. First, does adding staging to a language compromise any equalities that hold in the base language? Unfortunately it does, and more care is needed to reason about terms with free variables. Second, staging annotations, as the name "annotations" suggests, are often thought to be orthogonal to the behavior of a program, but when is this formally guaranteed to be true? We give termination conditions that characterize when this guarantee holds. Finally, do multi-stage languages satisfy useful, standard extensional properties, for example, that functions agreeing on all arguments are equivalent? We provide a sound and complete notion of applicative bisimulation, which establishes such properties or, in principle, any valid program equivalence. These results yield important insights into staging and allow us to prove the correctness of quite complicated multi-stage programs.

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Reasoning about Multi-stage Programs

Cited by 11 publications

References 30 publications

Early detection of type errors in C++ templates

Early detection of type errors in C++ templates

Reasoning about Multi-stage Programs

Reasoning about multi-stage programs

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