| Website: | website containing additional information |
| Course code: | INFOGP |
| Credits: | 7.5 ECTS (=5.25 old credit points) |
| Period: | periode 4 (week 17 t/m 27, dwz 24-4-2006 t/m 7-7-2006; herkansing week 35)
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| Timeslot: | D |
| Participants: | up till now 18 subscriptions |
| Schedule: | Dit is een oud rooster!
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| Contents: | Software usually works with structured information; think of Web-browsers and HTML-documents. This structure can be represented by a data type or a DTD (Document Type Definition). If such a type changes, all programs that work on that type have to be changed too, although often the central problem does not change.
In the course on generic programming we will discuss methods with which problems can be formulated and solved for arbitrary data types or DTDs. The result is a generic program. An example of a generic program is a program for pattern matching: finding occurrences of a patterns in a given value. This problem is well known in the domain of strings, but it is equally important for trees or matrices. By specialising to a given type we get a normal, type-specific program. Many design patterns are also instances of generic programs.
In the course we will discuss generic programming by means of a number of example problems. You will also see some basic lambda calculus, which can be used to type-check and specialize generic programs. We will use the programming language Generic Haskell, an extension of Haskell that supports generic programming, in particular on XML related problems.
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| Literature: | The literature consists of Andres Löh's PhD thesis, and a number of articles that will be distributed during the course. |
| Course form: | In the first part of the course you will learn how to write generic programs in Generic Haskell. Besides 4 lectures, you will develop a couple of generic programs in small groups, working closely together with the teacher. We will try to use these programs in papers for the Workshop on Generic Programming in Portland (US) in September. Possible topics: generic edit distance/diff, generic XML compression, generic data migration tool, etc.
In the second half of the course we will discuss the background of generic programming in a couple of lectures. |
| Exam form: | A student will be graded by means of the practical that will have to be handed in, and an exam at the end of the course. |
| Minimum effort to qualify for 2nd chance exam: | To qualify for 2nd chance exam you have to both hand in the practicals and the first exam. |
| Description: | We will discuss the following topics. Minor changes might be made before the course starts.
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A polymorphic lambda calculus
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Type-indexed functions
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Kind-indexed types
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Dependencies between type-indexed functions
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XML,DTD,Schema
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HaXml, XML-Haskell data bindings
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Generic programming for XML tools
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Specialization
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