Phase Distinction
Phase Distinction is a property of programming languages that observe a strict division between types and terms. A concise rule for determining whether phase distinction is preserved in a language or not has been proposed by Luca Cardelli - ''If A is a compile-time term and B is a subterm of A, then B must also be a compile-time term.'' Most statically typed languages conform to the principle of phase distinction. However, some languages with especially flexible and expressive type systems (notably dependently typed programming languages) allow types to be manipulated in the same ways as regular terms. They may be passed to functions or returned as results. A language with phase distinction may have separate namespaces for types and run-time variables. In an optimizing compiler, phase distinction marks the boundary between expressions which are safe to erase Erase may refer to: *Data erasure, a method of software-based overwriting that completely destroys all electronic da ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Typed Lambda Calculus
A typed lambda calculus is a typed formalism that uses the lambda-symbol (\lambda) to denote anonymous function abstraction. In this context, types are usually objects of a syntactic nature that are assigned to lambda terms; the exact nature of a type depends on the calculus considered (see kinds below). From a certain point of view, typed lambda calculi can be seen as refinements of the untyped lambda calculus, but from another point of view, they can also be considered the more fundamental theory and ''untyped lambda calculus'' a special case with only one type. Typed lambda calculi are foundational programming languages and are the base of typed functional programming languages such as ML and Haskell and, more indirectly, typed imperative programming languages. Typed lambda calculi play an important role in the design of type systems for programming languages; here, typability usually captures desirable properties of the program (e.g., the program will not cause a memory acces ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Expression (computer Science)
In computer science, an expression is a syntactic entity in a programming language that may be evaluated to determine its value. It is a combination of one or more constants, variables, functions, and operators that the programming language interprets (according to its particular rules of precedence and of association) and computes to produce ("to return", in a stateful environment) another value. This process, for mathematical expressions, is called ''evaluation''. In simple settings, the resulting value is usually one of various primitive types, such as numerical, string, boolean, complex data type or other types. Expression is often contrasted with statement—a syntactic entity that has no value (an instruction). Examples For example, 2 + 3 is both an arithmetic and programming expression, which evaluates to 5. A variable is an expression because it denotes a value in memory, so y + 6 is also an expression. An example of a relational expression is 4 ≠4, which eval ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Luca Cardelli
Luca Andrea Cardelli, Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), is an Italian computer scientist who is a research professor at the University of Oxford in Oxford, UK. Cardelli is well known for his research in type theory and operational semantics. Among other contributions, in programming languages, he helped design the language Modula-3, implemented the first compiler for the (non-pure) functional language ML, defined the concept of ''typeful programming'', and helped develop the experimental language Polyphonic C#. Education He was born in Montecatini Terme, Italy. He attended the University of Pisa before receiving his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from the University of Edinburgh in 1982. Before joining the University of Oxford in 2014, and Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK in 1997, he worked for Bell Labs and Digital Equipment Corporation, and contributed to Unix software including vismon. Awards In 2004 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. H ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis in history. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially wit ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dependently Typed Programming Language
In computer science and logic, a dependent type is a type whose definition depends on a value. It is an overlapping feature of type theory and type systems. In intuitionistic type theory, dependent types are used to encode logic's Generalized quantifier, quantifiers like "for all" and "there exists". In functional programming languages like Agda (theorem prover), Agda, ATS (programming language), ATS, Coq, F* (programming language), F*, Epigram (programming language), Epigram, and Idris (programming language), Idris, dependent types help reduce bugs by enabling the programmer to assign types that further restrain the set of possible implementations. Two common examples of dependent types are ''dependent functions'' and ''dependent pairs''. The return type of a dependent function may depend on the ''value'' (not just type) of one of its arguments. For instance, a function that takes a positive integer n may return an array of length n, where the array length is part of the type of t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Namespace
In computing, a namespace is a set of signs (''names'') that are used to identify and refer to objects of various kinds. A namespace ensures that all of a given set of objects have unique names so that they can be easily identified. Namespaces are commonly structured as hierarchies to allow reuse of names in different contexts. As an analogy, consider a system of naming of people where each person has a given name, as well as a family name shared with their relatives. If the first names of family members are unique only within each family, then each person can be uniquely identified by the combination of first name and family name; there is only one Jane Doe, though there may be many Janes. Within the namespace of the Doe family, just "Jane" suffices to unambiguously designate this person, while within the "global" namespace of all people, the full name must be used. Prominent examples for namespaces include file systems, which assign names to files. Some programming languages ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Optimizing Compiler
In computing, an optimizing compiler is a compiler that tries to minimize or maximize some attributes of an executable computer program. Common requirements are to minimize a program's execution time, memory footprint, storage size, and power consumption (the last three being popular for portable computers). Compiler optimization is generally implemented using a sequence of ''optimizing transformations'', algorithms which take a program and transform it to produce a semantically equivalent output program that uses fewer resources or executes faster. It has been shown that some code optimization problems are NP-complete, or even undecidable. In practice, factors such as the programmer's willingness to wait for the compiler to complete its task place upper limits on the optimizations that a compiler might provide. Optimization is generally a very CPU- and memory-intensive process. In the past, computer memory limitations were also a major factor in limiting which optimizations coul ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Type Erasure
In programming languages, type erasure is the load-time process by which explicit type annotations are removed from a program, before it is executed at run-time. Operational semantics that do not require programs to be accompanied by types are called ''type-erasure semantics'', to be contrasted with ''type-passing semantics''. The possibility of giving type-erasure semantics is a kind of abstraction principle, ensuring that the run-time execution of a program does not depend on type information. In the context of generic programming, the opposite of type erasure is called reification. Type inference The reverse operation is called type inference. Though type erasure can be used as an easy way to define typing over implicitly typed languages (an implicitly typed term is well-typed if and only if it is the erasure of a well-typed explicitly typed lambda term), it does not always lead to an algorithm to check implicitly typed terms. See also * Template (C++) * Problems with ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |