A puzzle about typing

While making a comment on Stackoverflow I noticed something: suppose we have a term in the $\lambda$-calculus in which no abstracted variable is used more than once. For example, $\lambda a b c . (a b) (\lambda d. d c)$ is such a term, but $\lambda f . f (\lambda x . x x)$ is not because [...]

Running a classical proof with choice in Agda

As a preparation for my part of a joint tutorial Programs from proofs at MFPS 27 at the end of this month with Ulrich Berger, Monika Seisenberger, and Paulo Oliva, I’ve developed in Agda some things we’ve been doing together.

Using

Berardi-Bezem-Coquand functional, or alternatively,
Berger-Oliva modified bar recursion, or alternatively,
Escardo-Oliva countable product of selection functions,

for giving a [...]

Bob Harper has a blog

Bob Harper of CMU, has recently started a blog, called Existential Type, about programming languages. He is a leading expert in Programming Languages. I remember being deeply inspired the first time I heard him talk. I was an incoming graduate student at CMU and he presented what the programming languages people at CMU did. His posts [...]

Delimited continuations in eff

Let’s keep the blog rolling! Here are delimited continuations in eff, and a bunch of questions I do not know the answers to.

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How eff handles built-in effects

From some of the responses we have been getting it looks like people think that the io effect in eff is like unsafePerformIO in Haskell, namely that it causes an effect but pretends to be pure. This is not the case. Let me explain how eff handles built-in effects.

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Programming with effects II: Introducing eff

This is a second post about the programming language eff. We covered the theory behind it in a previous post. Now we turn to the programming language itself.

Please bear in mind that eff is an academic experiment. It is not meant to take over the world. Yet. We just wanted to show that the theoretical ideas about the algebraic nature of computational effects can be put into practice. Eff has many superficial similarities with Haskell. This is no surprise because there is a precise connection between algebras and monads. The main advantage of eff over Haskell is supposed to be the ease with which computational effects can be combined.

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Programming with effects I: Theory

I just returned from Paris where I was visiting the INRIA πr² team. It was a great visit, everyone was very hospitable, the food was great, and the weather was nice. I spoke at their seminar where I presented a new programming language eff which is based on the idea that computational effects are algebras. The language has been designed and implemented jointly by Matija Pretnar and myself. Eff is far from being finished, but I think it is ready to be shown to the world. What follows is an extended transcript of the talk I gave in Paris. It is divided into two posts. The present one reviews the basic theory of algebras for a signature and how they are related to computational effects. The impatient readers can skip ahead to the second part, which is about the programming language.

A side remark: I have updated the blog to WordPress to 3.0 and switched to MathJax for displaying mathematics. Now I need to go through 70 old posts and convert the old ASCIIMathML notation to MathJax, as well as fix characters which got garbled during the update. Oh well, it is an investment for the future.

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Random Art and the Law of Rotten Software

Since the death of my old web server my Random Art has not worked. Bringing it up to date and installing it on the new server was a nightmare in software management. But it was worth it. The new Random Art runs the random art program inside your browser!

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Random art in Python

I get asked every so often to release the source code for my random art project. The original source is written in Ocaml and is not publicly available, but here is a simple example of how you can get random art going in python in 250 lines of code.

Download source: randomart.py

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Tutorial on exact real numbers in Coq

Already a while ago videolectures.net published this tutorial on Computer Verified Exact Analysis by Bas Spitters and Russell O’Connor from Computability and Complexity in Analysis 2009. I forgot to advertise it, so I am doing this now. It is about an implementation of exact real arithmetic whose correctness has been verified in Coq. Russell also gave [...]