[eas_cs_seminars] 14th February 2017

[Luca Rossi]

Dear all,

The next talk in the CS seminars series will take place next Tuesday
(14/02).
Dr. Anakreontas Mentis will give a talk titled "Productivity tools for a
legacy interpreted programming language" in MB220 from 2pm to 3pm.

Best,
Luca

Abstract
Phoebus Software Ltd is a leading provider of software for the management
of lending and savings at financial institutions. Phoebus has been able to
produce high quality reliable software fast with the help of their in-house
programming language called P4. P4 has features for rapid development of
complex form-based database-backed applications. However, P4 was designed
20 years ago and lacks tools present in modern programming languages such
as code checkers and IDEs. Moreover, P4 is interpreted and supports code
changes on-the-fly when deployed. This dynamic nature of the language has
become an obstacle as the code base has grown very large. We describe how
we improved the definition of the P4 language and produced a validator
that, when integrated with an IDE, identifies various classes of
programming defects while editing a P4 program. In particular, we have
added a type system to P4 and defined finite-state models for the database
interaction. We also give an overview of the technology used “under the
hood”, namely the Haskell functional programming language, the Parsec
parser library and the Hoopl library for control flow analysis.

-- 
Luca Rossi

Lecturer in Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Aston University
Web: http://www.cs.aston.ac.uk/~rossil/ <http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rossil/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.aston.ac.uk/pipermail/eas_cs_seminars/attachments/20170207/01c29567/attachment.html