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Balestrieri, Florent (2015) The productivity of polymorphic stream equations and the composition of circular traversals. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.

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Abstract

This thesis has two independent parts concerned with different aspects of laziness in functional programs. The first part is a theoretical study of productivity for very restricted stream programs. In the second part we define a programming abstraction over a recursive pattern for defining circular traversals modularly.

Productivity is in general undecidable. By restricting ourselves to mutually recursive polymorphic stream equations having only three basic operations, namely "head", "tail", and "cons", we aim to prove interesting properties about productivity. Still undecidable for this restricted class of programs, productivity of polymorphic stream functions is equivalent to the totality of their indexing function, which characterise their behaviour in terms of operations on indices. We prove that our equations generate all possible polymorphic stream functions, and therefore their indexing functions are all the computable functions, whose totality problem is indeed undecidable. We then further restrict our language by reducing the numbers of equations and parameters, but despite those constraints the equations retain their expressiveness. In the end we establish that even two non-mutually recursive equations on unary stream functions are undecidable with complexity $Π_2^0$. However, the productivity of a single unary equation is decidable.

Circular traversals have been used in the eighties as an optimisation to combine multiple traversals in a single traversal. In particular they provide more opportunities for applying deforestation techniques since it is the case that an intermediate datastructure can only be eliminated if it is consumed only once. Another use of circular programs is in the implementation of attribute grammars in lazy functional languages. There is a systematic transformation to define a circular traversal equivalent to multiple traversals. Programming with this technique is not modular since the individual traversals are merged together. Some tools exist to transform programs automatically and attribute grammars have been suggested as a way to describe the circular traversals modularly. Going to the root of the problem, we identify a recursive pattern that allows us to define circular programs modularly in a functional style. We give two successive implementations, the first one is based on algebras and has limited scope: not all circular traversals can be defined this way. We show that the recursive scheme underlying attribute grammars computation rules is essential to combine circular programs. We implement a generic recursive operation on a novel attribute grammar abstraction, using containers as a parametric generic representation of recursive datatypes. The abstraction makes attribute grammars first-class objects. Such a strongly typed implementation is novel and make it possible to implement a high level embedded language for defining attribute grammars, with many interesting new features promoting modularity.

Item Type:	Thesis (University of Nottingham only) (PhD)
Supervisors:	Capretta, V. Altenkirch, T.
Keywords:	Laziness, functional programming, coinduction, circularity, streams, attribute grammars
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA 75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Faculties/Schools:	UK Campuses > Faculty of Science > School of Computer Science
Item ID:	29745
Depositing User:	Balestrieri, Florent
Date Deposited:	04 Apr 2016 14:15
Last Modified:	13 Oct 2017 16:55
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/29745

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