Domain Specific Languages
Afp0405
6 july 2005
The
scores for the exam are published. Contact me if you are interested in
a meeting to discuss the questions of the exam
(also possible after the summer vacation).
4 july 2005
The scores for the assignments have been updated (see
Course Organization).
27 june 2005
The last part of the programming assignment must be submitted in three stages:
- Wed: submit your .ant file for the tournament
- Thu: short presentation (20 min)
- Fri: submit final version
17 june 2005
Read the addendum to
Exercise 4. The exam for AFP will be on
5-7-2005, 9:00-12:00, BBL-420 (see the
Education Page).
14 june 2005
The first DSEL presentations are now online. The results of the Dazzle review exercise
are published
here (see attachment).
9 june 2005
Exercise 4 is published.
1 june 2005
The content of the
exercises has changed.
26 may 2005
See
MVC.hs on the
Course Schedule for a (simple) implementation of the MVC paradigm.
18 may 2005
The grades for Exercise 1 can be found in the attachment on the
Course Organization page.
12 may 2005
A hint on exercise 2 is added to the
Discussion Forum.
The selected papers on
Functional Data Structures will be announced on the
Course Literature page.
2 may 2005
Exercise 1 has been published. The submission deadline for this exercise is extended to
May 9th (Monday).
29 apr 2005
We have three groups for the programming assignment, and the DSL topics have been assigned and
scheduled. The ST Wiki has recently moved to a new server. This may explain some of the problems
to access the wiki pages. Please make sure that you are able to modify the content of the
Discussion Forum.
26 apr 2005
The slides of the first lecture are now available. The
Course Literature page
contains a zip file with all selected papers.
1 apr 2005
Set up of Afp0405 web (2004/2005)
Task Description
All students have to further investigate one domain specific language: the available topics are listed below, and these will
be assigned in the first week. For each topic, a number of starting points (web sites, papers, etc.) are given. Given these
starting points, try to find
as much relevant information as possible about your assigned topic. The task consists of two parts:
- One 30 minute presentation (in English). You are encouraged to download existing software, to experiment with it, and to show us a (small) demo.
- A review report (about 2 pages). This report should contain at least the following ingredients.
- a summary
- the additional gain of embedding your assigned DSL in a functional language like Haskell.
- your opinion about and experiences with the combinator library.
For this assignment, students may work in pairs. The assignment may also be completed individually, as long as there are enough topics available.
Topics
Haskell DB
(
from the HaskellDB? homepage)
HaskellDB? is a combinator library for expressing queries and other operations on relational databases in a type safe and declarative way. All the queries and operations are completely expressed within Haskell, no embedded (SQL) commands are needed. This close integration makes it possible to do arbitrary computations on the database (like computing the transitive closure) and makes it very easy to combine
HaskellDB? with other combinator libraries (like Erik Meijer's CGI library or John Hughes pretty printer).
Resources:
Computer Music
(
from the Haskore Computer Music System homepage)
Haskore is a collection of Haskell modules designed for expressing musical structures in the high-level, declarative style of functional programming. In Haskore, musical objects consist of primitive notions such as notes and rests, operations to transform musical objects such as transpose and tempo-scaling, and operations to combine musical objects to form more complex ones, such as concurrent and sequential composition. From these simple roots, much richer musical ideas can easily be developed.
Resources:
Financial Combinators
(
from Simon PJ's homepage)
Financial and insurance contracts do not sound like promising territory for functional programming and formal semantics, but in fact we have discovered that insights from programming languages bear directly on the complex subject of describing and valuing a large class of contracts.
We introduce a combinator library that allows us to describe such contracts precisely, and a compositional denotational semantics that says what such contracts are worth. We sketch an implementation of our combinator library in Haskell. Interestingly, lazy evaluation plays a crucial role.
Resources:
XML Tools
A number of Haskell libraries exist for processing XML. These libraries typically offer facilities such as parsing, filtering, transforming, validating, and generating XML documents. Two well-known combinator libraries for processing XML are
HaXML? and The Haskell XML Toolbox.
Resources:
Pan#
(from the Pan# homepage)
Pan# combines basic mathematical operations with functional abstraction and a simple vocabulary of images. This language puts the tools of visualization in the hands of the student and instructor rather than hiding them deep inside bundled software. Images are defined in a very simple and direct way, free of the details that tell a computer how to display the image. Because images are described using mathematical functions, this language is entirely appropriate for anyone with knowledge of basic algebra.
Resources:
Lava
(
from the Lava homepage)
Lava is a hardware description language based upon the functional programming language Haskell. Its main aim is to show that modern programming language features such as type inference, polymorphism, higher-order functions, type classes, and laziness are very useful even in hardware description.
Resources:
Yampa
(from the Yampa homepage)
Yampa is the culmination of our efforts to provide domain-specific embedded languages for the programming of hybrid systems using the concepts of Functional Reactive Programming (FRP). Yampa is structured using arrows, which greatly reduce the chance of introducing space- and time-leaks into reactive, time-varying systems.
Resources:
Fran
(from the Fran homepage)
(...)
This article presents one approach to declarative programming of interactive content, as realized in a prototype system called Fran, for "Functional reactive animation" [Elliott and Hudak 1997, Elliott 1997]. Fran is a high level vocabulary that allows one to describe the essential nature of an animated model, while omitting details of presentation. Moreover, because this vocabulary is embedded in a modern functional programming language (Haskell), the animation models thus described are reusable and composable in powerful ways.
Resources:
(Pretty Printing)
(This can only be selected in case we run out of topics)
Resources:
(Parsing)
(This can only be selected in case we run out of topics)
Resources:
ppt 
zip 
pdf