David Turner visita l'LSI i ens parla de Total Functional Programming

El Professor David Turner visitarà el Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics de la UPC del dia 13 fins al dia 17 de Maig. Durant la seva estada entre nosaltres farà una xerrada el proper dimecres dia 14 de Maig.

The driving idea of functional programming is to make programming more closely related to mathematics. A program in a functional language such as Haskell or Miranda consists of equations, which are both computation rules and a basis for simple algebraic reasoning about the functions and data structures they define.

The existing model of functional programming, although elegant and powerful, is compromised to a greater extent than is commonly recognised by the presence of partial functions. I will sketch a discipline of TOTAL functional programming in which the language is modified to exclude the possibility of non-termination. Among other things this requires introducing a type distinction between data, which is finite, and codata, which is potentially infinite.

David Turner has held professorships at Queen Mary College, University of Texas at Austin and the University of Kent. He is currently Emeritus Professor at Middlesex University and also at the University of Kent. Professor Turner is best known as the inventor of combinator graphreduction and for designing and implementing a series of pure non-strictfunctional programming languages, including Miranda which was the mainprecursor of Haskell. He invented or coinvented many of the ideas whichare now standard in functional programming including pattern matching withguards, list comprehensions and the "list of successes" method foreliminating backtracking. His current research interests include "strongfunctional programming", in which all computations terminate, type systemswith dependent types and connections between functional programming andintuitionist logic.