Advanced Functional Programming
[ DI/UM ]

[ General information | Course Staff | Structure of the Course | Number of students | Assessment | Program synopsis
Program in detail (Last updated: 03/12/09) List of Projects Available | Final Marks ]

  General information

Advanced Functional Programming is a new optional course made available for 5th year students of the following degrees:

5309??

- Licenciatura em Engenharia de Sistemas e Informática

7009??

- Licenciatura em Matemática e Ciências da Computação

  Course Staff

(Alphabetically ordered by surname) J.C. Bacelar, J.B. Barros, M.A. Cunha, J.N. Oliveira J.S. Pinto, J.A. Saraiva (course leader), Joost Visser,

  Structure of the Course

The course is organised into two parts:

1. A set of seminars introducing relevant topics to be covered. This seminars will be primarily given by the students. Some more advanced material, however, can/will be presented by the course lecturers or by guests visiting the department.
2. In the second, more substantial part of the course, students will develop of a project (see List of Projects Available).

  Number of students

Minimum 6, maximum 10.

  Assessment

The following three items will be taken into account for student evaluation:

A

Background lecture

The students will deliver a short lecture (20m) introducing one of the topics covered in the course.

B

Brief Project/Tool Presentation

The different groups will give a lecture (30m) presenting the project they have chosen for development and the tool(s) that will be used in this task.

C

Project Presentation and Report

Each group will give a lecture presenting the project.

The final mark is computed according to the formula:

A * 0.2 + B * 0.3 + C * 0.5

  Program synopsis

Main topics of the course are:

• Imperative Functional Programming
  • Monads and Effects
  • Robots
  • Graphical User Interfaces
• Functional Programming for the Web
  • Scripting Combinators (Wash-CGI)
  • HaXML/XQuery
  • Language Processing in Strafunski
  • HASKELL development tools
• Advanced Functional Data Structures
• Program transformation techniques

  Program in detail

• Week 1 (2003.10.06): kick off: definition of topics and projects

• Week 2 (2003.10.13): meetings with supervisors

• Week 3 (2003.10.20): talk by Ralf Lämmel
  • When/Where: Oct 23rd, 2pm, room DI-1.07
  • Title: Generic programming in Haskell
  • Abstract: We present the "scrap your boilerplate" style of generic programming in HASKELL. This approach is readily supported by the GHC implementation of Haskell. It is based on the type class Typeable for type-safe cast, and on the type class Data for term traversal and term building. (Instances of these classes are derived by the compiler.) A characteristic of the approach is that rank-2 types are employed to provide types to generic function combinators, e.g., traversal schemes. While the approach is focused on supporting generic traversal, it also covers other kinds of generic functions such as read, show, equality, and unification.
  • Slides: PS
  • Links: www.cs.vu.nl/boilerplate/ (Joint work with Simon Peyton Jones). This effort is also related to Strafunski, which is joint work with Joost Visser.

• Week 4 (2003.10.27): students presentations (item A)
  • Advanced Functional Data Structures by João Paulo Fernandes, nr. 30730

  • Debugging Lazy programs by José Miguel Pereira Vilaça, nr. 30733 (presentation: zip)

• Week 5 (2003.11.03): talk by Joost Visser
  • When/Where: Nov 6th, 2pm, room DI-1.07
  • Title: Strafunski: a Haskell-centered bundle for generic programming and language processing
  • Abstract: Strafunski is a bundle of a combinator library and various generative tools that support key tasks in language processing: parser generation and traversal. The traversal support is based on the notion of functional strategies: generic functions that can traverse into terms of any type while mixing type-specific and uniform behaviour. The parsing support is involves connectivity to the Generalized LR parser SGLR. Finally, an enhanced version of DrIFT ensures that traversal and parsing support can easily be deployed for (extremely) large languages such as Java or Cobol.

    The following will be covered in the talk:

    • Essentials of Strafunski: concepts and architecture, relationship to GHC's Data.Generics as presented by Ralf Laemmel last week
    • Design patterns for programming with Strafunski
    • Quick demo's of applications of Strafunski (Java metrics, Cobol control-flow analysis, HASKELL transformation)

  • Slides: PDF
  • Links:
    • Strafunski Quickstart
      To get a quick introduction into Strafunski, download the latest distribution (zip file StrategyLib-4.0-beta.zip), and work out the exercises in the literate HASKELL program (lhs file strafunski_exerc.lhs). This literate program is also a L^ATEX document. When finishing the exercises, you can produce a PDF file using pdflatex, and send us your solutions in that form.
    • Exercises on XML processing in Strafunski

• Week 6 (2003.11.10): students presentations (item A)
  • Functional Reactive Programming (Robots) by Alberto Manuel Mendes, nr. 29601 (presentation: tar.gz)

  • The Haskell Program Transformation System MAG by Miguel Pedro Eiriz Gonçalves, nr. 25944 (presentation: zip, including the MAG tool, for Linux and Windows)

• Week 7 (2003.11.17): talk by Peter Thiemann
  • When/Where: Nov 20th, 2pm, room A2
  • Title: Functional Web Programming
  • Abstract: Server-side Web scripting is currently dominated by imperative programming languages like Perl, PHP, JavaScript, Java, and C. We give an introduction to Wash/CGI, a radically different approach to server-side Web scripting based on functional programming. Our approach builds on an intuitive compositional method for constructing parameterized Web pages. This method extends seamlessly to the construction of forms. The entries to forms are retrieved through a novel type-safe interface. Submission of forms is modeled with a callback-style interface. This way, a Wash/CGI script specifies an entire interactive session in a declarative way.

  • Slides: [ To become available very soon ]
  • Links:

    Wash/CGI Quickstart
    Installation of GHC6.0/WASH:

    1. Download file washBin.tar.bz2
    2. Run tar xvjf washBin.tar.bz2
    3. Change directory to the ghc sub-directory and run ./configure;make in-place
    4. Add directory of GHC binaries ( $HOME/ghc-6.0.1/bin/i386-unknown-linux ) to your PATH
    5. Go to to directory WASH-CGI/examples and...have fun.

• Week 8 (2003.11.24): students presentations (item B)

• Week 9 (2003.12.01): talk by M.A. Cunha
  • When/Where: Dec 4th, 2pm, room DI-1.07
  • Title: Pointfree programming in HASKELL.
  • Abstract: In this talk we review some techniques to implement generic recursion patterns in HASKELL. We also present a new method that besides being generic allows one to program in the point-free style.

  • Links: Files examples.hs and pfrecpat.hs require suitable extensions of GHC.

• Week 10 (2003.12.08): presentation of intermediate results to supervisors

• Week 11 (2003.12.15): presentation of intermediate results to supervisors

• January 2004: project presentations (item C)

  List of Projects Available

List of projects announced so far (12th Sept.):

1 - Legacy Unravelled with Strafunski

Project Supervisor(s): Joost Visser, J.N. Oliveira

Brief Description: Make use of "functional strategies" as provided by the Strafunski package to implement various (simple) program understanding algorithms. Dump the analysis results (metics and dependencies) into a relational database. You will be given the opportunity to apply your algorithms to a system of at least 100.000 lines of legacy code to see if they scale up, and to use the the Software Analysis Toolkit of the Software Improvement Group to visualize the results.

Tools/Links: Strafunski

URL: [to be completed]

2 - Football Robots in HASKELL

Project Supervisor(s): J.C. Bacelar, M.A. Cunha

Brief Description: [to be completed]

Tools/Links: Functional Reactive Programming

URL: [to be completed]

Students: José Miguel Pereira Vilaça, nr. 30733 and João Paulo Fernandes, nr. 30730

3 - Software Evaluation as a Web service

Project Supervisor(s): J.A. Saraiva, J.C. Bacelar

Brief Description: Make use of the Wash/CGI combinator library to construct a web page where one can submit a HASKELL program and automatically test it. The idea is to build a web-based system that automatically marks HASKELL projects/exercises.

Tools/Links: Wash/CGI, Quickcheck

URL: [to be completed]

Students: Alberto Manuel Mendes, nr 29601 and Miguel Pedro Eiriz Gonçalves, nr. 25944

4 - Querying and Transforming XML in HASKELL

Project Supervisor(s): Joost Visser, J.A. Saraiva

Brief Description: Modelling of XML Querying and Transformation in the paradigm of strategic programming, using the Strafunski library.

Tools/Links: Strafunski, HaXML, XQuery, HaQuery

URL: [to be completed]

Students:

• José Miguel Pereira Vilaça, nr. 30733 and João Paulo Fernandes, nr. 30730
• Alberto Manuel Mendes, nr 29601 and Miguel Pedro Eiriz Gonçalves, nr. 25944

5 - Graphical Interfaces in HASKELL for Databases

Project Supervisor(s): J.B. Barros, J.S. Pinto

Brief Description: [to be completed]

Tools/Links: [to be completed]

URL: [to be completed]

6 - Using MAG for HASKELL Program Transformation

Project Supervisor(s): J.S. Pinto, J.N. Oliveira

Brief Description: [to be completed]

Tools/Links: [to be completed]

URL: [to be completed]

  Final Marks

Information to become available in due time.

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