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Section: New Results
Language design and type systems
Refactoring with ornaments in ML
Participants : Thomas Williams, Lucas Baudin, Didier Rémy.
Thomas Williams, Lucas Baudin, and Didier Rémy have been working on refactoring and other transformations of ML programs based on mixed ornamentation and disornamentation. Ornaments have been introduced as a way of describing changes in data type definitions that can reorganize or add pieces of data. After a new data structure has been described as an ornament of an older one, the functions that operate on the bare structure can be partially or sometimes totally lifted into functions that operate on the ornamented structure.
Williams and Rémy improved the formalisation of the lifting framework: using ornament inference, an ML program is first elaborated into a generic program, which can be seen as a template for all possible liftings of the original program. The generic program is defined in a superset of ML. It can then be instantiated with specific ornaments, and simplified back to an ML program. Williams and Rémy studied the semantics of this intermediate language and used it to prove the correctness of the lifting, using logical relations techniques. This work has been presented at POPL 2018 [12]. More technical details appear in a research report [43].
Lucas Baudin and Dider Rémy also studied the inverse transformation, disornamentation, which allows removing pieces of information from a data structure and adjusting the code accordingly. They showed that the framework of ornamentation can also be used to allow mixed ornamentation and disornamentation transformations. They also designed a new patch language to describe in a more robust manner how the code must be modified during such transformations. This enables a new class of applications, such as maintaining two views of a data structure in sync. For example, the location information in an abstract syntax tree, which is used to report error messages but obfuscates the code, can be projected away, leading to a simpler version of the code, which can then be modified and often automatically reornamented into the richer version of the code with locations. Disonamentation has been presented by Lucas Baudin at the ML 2018 workshop. Ornamentation, including mixed disornamentation, has also been presented at the MSFP 2018 workshop in Oxford.
A small prototype with ornamentation has been written by Thomas Williams and extended with disornamentation by Lucas Baudin. Thomas Williams has also started developing a new version of the prototype that will handle most of the OCaml language.