Introduction to Computing Science Research

Topics in Functional Programming

• Contents of the course.
• Schedule for the lectures.
• Exercises and examination.
• Suggested reading.
• Other web pages of interest.

Contents of the course

• A quick overview of local research in the functional programming area.
• A quick introduction to Haskell and HBC for those who don't already know it.
• Introduction to programming with Fudgets. Fudgets allow you to, a high level of abstraction, create programs with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and programs that communicate across the Internet. I will also talk about stream processors, what Fudgets are made of, and briefly discuss issues like concurrency and non-determinism.
• Lennart Augustsson will talk about programming in Cayenne, I lazy functional language with dependent types.
• Koen Claessen will talk about Lava, how to use Haskell to do hardware design.
• Magnus Carlsson will talk about how to do memoisation and regular expression matching in Haskell.
• Some of the students will give presentations of functional programming research papers:
  • 10.15 Carlos Gonzalia presents The Role of Lazy Evaluation in Amortized Data Structures, Chris Okasaki, 1996
  • 13.15 Qiao presents How to make ad-hoc polymorphism less ad hoc., Philip Wadler 1989.
  • 14.15 Staffan Björk presents Type classes: exploring the design space, Simon Peyton et al, 1997.

Schedule

Exercises and examination

• Read a recent research paper on functional programming and give a presentation (30-45 minutes) of it to the rest of the group.

• Do a small programming project in Haskell or Cayenne. Here is list of possible projects of varying sizes:

  • Generate a maze and display it in 2D or 3D using Fudgets.
  • Program a GUI to some simple board game. There is an implementation of the game Noughts and Crosses that you can use. More info.
  • Implement a simple Spread Sheet.
  • Implement a simple Web Browser.
  • Implement a web interface to a data base.
  • Implement an answering machine with a GUI.
  • Implement a GUI interface to an MP3 player.
  • Polytypism: write a program to generate fold/map/equality functions for given data types

  I can provide more details on request. Some of these are probably too large. Some may be suitable for two co-operating programmers.

Reading material

Current research: papers from ICFP'98

• Cayenne -- a Language with Dependent Types (Lennart Augustsson) (the link is not the ICFP paper)
• Lava: Hardware Design in Haskell (Per Bjesse, Koen Claessen, Mary Sheeran, Satnam Singh)
• Pragmatic Subtyping in Polymorphic Languages (Johan Nordlander)
• A Type Based Sharing Analysis for Update Avoidance and Optimisation (Jörgen Gustavsson)
• A Theory of Core Fudgets (Colin Taylor)

Older stuff

• Why Functional Programming Matters. John Hughes, 1984.
• On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism, Luca Cardelli, Peter Wegner, 1985.
• How to make ad-hoc polymorphism less ad hoc., Philip Wadler 1989.
• Fudgets - A Graphical User Interface in a Lazy Functional Language. Magnus Carlsson & Thomas Hallgren. In FPCA'93.
• Type classes: exploring the design space, Simon Peyton et al, 1997.
• Reactive Objects in a Functional Language -- An escape from the evil ``I''., Johan Nordlander and Magnus Carlsson, 1997.
• Functional Reactive Animation, Conal Elliott and Paul Hudak. In ICFP'97.
• Fudgets - Purely Functional Processes with applications to Graphical User Interfaces Magnus Carlsson & Thomas Hallgren. PhD Thesis, 1998.

Other lists of papers

• Tutorial Papers in Functional Programming

Other web pages of interest

• The intro course page.
• Cayenne.
• Fudgets home page. Reference Manual.
• Fran. Functional Reactive Animation.
• Haskell. Everything you want to know about Haskell, including The Haskell Bookshelf.
• HBC, HBC Libraries.
• Lava.
• Polytypism.
• SEL-HPC Functional Programming Archive. Lots of papers.
• Summer Schools on Advanced Functional Programming: 1st, 2nd, 3rd.
• The course Advanced Functional Programming.