Domain Specific Languages

Afp0405
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---+ 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

| *Subject* | *Assigned to* | *Presentation*|
|Haskell DB  | Gerrit van den Geest + Huib van den Brink | [[%ATTACHURL%/DSEL-haskelldb.pdf][DSEL-haskelldb.pdf]] |
|Computer Music | José Pedro Magalhães + Bogdan Dumitriu | [[%ATTACHURL%/DSEL-music.zip][DSEL-music.zip]] |
|Fran  | Lee Provoost + Rinse van Hees | [[%ATTACHURL%/DSEL-fran.zip][DSEL-fran.zip]] |
|Financial Combinators | Jacob Kleerekoper + Reinier Vis | [[%ATTACHURL%/DSEL-financial.ppt][DSEL-financial.ppt]] |
|Pan# | Huanwen Qu + Jinfeng Zhu | [[%ATTACHURL%/DSEL-pan.zip][DSEL-pan.zip]] |
|Lava | Raymon van Wanrooij + Arie Middelkoop | [[%ATTACHURL%/DSEL-lava.pdf][DSEL-lava.pdf]] | 
|XML Tools | - | |
|Yampa | - | |
|(Pretty Printing) | - | |
|(Parsing) | - | |

---++ 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:*
   * http://www.haskell.org/haskellDB/
   * http://haskelldb.sourceforge.net/
   * http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/HaskellDbTutorial
   * [[http://www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/pubs.html][Domain Specific Embedded Compilers (Leijen, Meijer)]]

---++ 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:*
   * http://haskell.org/haskore/
   
---++ 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:*
   * http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/Papers/financial-contracts/contracts-icfp.htm
   * [[http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Papers/financial-contracts/contracts-icfp.htm][How to write a financial contract (Peyton Jones, Eber)]]

---++ 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:*
   * http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/HaXml/
   * http://www.fh-wedel.de/~si/HXmlToolbox/

---++ 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:*
   * http://haskell.org/edsl/pansharp.html
   * http://haskell.org/edsl/pangallery.htm
   * [[http://conal.net/papers/functional-images/fop-conal.pdf][Functional images (Elliott)]]

---++ 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:*
   * http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen/Lava/
   * [[http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bjesse/lava.ps][Lava: Hardware design in Haskell (Bjesse, Claessen, Sheeran, Singh)]]

---++ 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:*
   * http://www.haskell.org/yampa/
   * [[http://www.haskell.org/yale/papers/oxford02/][Arrows, Robots, and Functional Reactive Programming (Hudak, Nilsson, Courtney, Peterson)]]
   * [[http://www.ida.liu.se/~henni/papers.html][The Yampa Arcade (Courtney, Nilsson, Peterson)]]

---++ 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:*
   * http://conal.net/fran/tutorial.htm
   * [[http://www.conal.net/papers/icfp97.ps][Functional Reactive Animation (Elliott, Hudak)]]

---++ (Pretty Printing)
_(This can only be selected in case we run out of topics)_

*Resources:*
   * http://www.haskell.org/libraries/#prettyprinting

---++ (Parsing)
_(This can only be selected in case we run out of topics)_

*Resources:*
   * http://www.haskell.org/libraries/#scannerParser
Topic attachments
I	Attachment	Action	Size	Date	Who	Comment
ppt	DSEL-financial.ppt	manage	150.0 K	17 Jun 2005 - 07:08	BastiaanHeeren	Financial Combinators
zip	DSEL-fran.zip	manage	420.1 K	17 Jun 2005 - 07:08	BastiaanHeeren	Functional Reactive Animations
pdf	DSEL-haskelldb.pdf	manage	498.3 K	14 Jun 2005 - 12:54	BastiaanHeeren	HaskellDB?
pdf	DSEL-lava.pdf	manage	968.2 K	17 Jun 2005 - 07:08	BastiaanHeeren	Lava
zip	DSEL-music.zip	manage	179.8 K	14 Jun 2005 - 12:54	BastiaanHeeren	Haskore Computer Music
zip	DSEL-pan.zip	manage	2358.9 K	17 Jun 2005 - 07:09	BastiaanHeeren	Pan#