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Modular Generation and Customization

The adventure in blogademics continues: I have posted a draft of my next paper. Comments are welcome – the deadline is 5/19. Thanks to everyone who supplied references in response to my last post – you are in the acknowledgments.

Update – the link above is to the final version, pusblished as a tech report. I should add for those familiar with my UI work that there is almost no UI in this paper. I am trying to motivate and explain the model underlying my last two papers. It’s not just about ease of use – it is also about expressive power.

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Collections with stable iterators

Oh oracle of the interwebs –

I am writing a GPCE paper, and one of the contributions is a model of sequences (AKA collections) that has stable unshifting positions. Standard collections use an array abstraction where access is by integer ordinal position, which shifts under insertion and deletion. This manifests as the fact that iterators are broken by insertion and deletion operations. Linked list iterators also break under deletion.

Does anyone know of alternative proposals with stable positions/iterators? I don’t know of any, but I can’t be the first person to do this. Continue reading “Collections with stable iterators”

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The modular transformation challenge

I got some good feedback here on my last paper. I want to see if I can get some equally good advice about what my next paper should be. My past papers have been about making programming easier. I would like to move on to making programming more powerful. Specifically, by making transformations and views a fundamental language feature. I have thought of a simple challenge problem that I might use to motivate and evaluate this idea. Please let me know whether you agree that a) this is actually an unsolved problem, and b) whether it is a worthwhile challenge. If there is interest, I will post this onto some collaborative editing surface. Thanks!

Continue reading “The modular transformation challenge”