Section: New Results

Meta-programming

Participants : Nicolas Pouillard, François Pottier.

In an effort to improve meta-programming support (the ability to write programs that manipulate other programs) in programming languages, we have focused first on the issue of binders. Programming with data structures containing binders occurs frequently: from compilers and static analysis tools to theorem provers and code generators, it is necessary to manipulate abstract syntax trees, type expressions, logical formulae, proof terms, etc. All these data structures contain variables and binding constructs.

Nicolas Pouillard, under the supervision of François Pottier, investigated the design of a programming interface for names and binders where the representations of these two types are kept abstract. This interface is sufficiently general to enable a large body of program transformations.

This year, the de Bruijn indices approach has been investigated more in-depth, resulting in a programming interface specialized to safe programming with de Bruijn indices and providing much more precise results than those published in 2010. This work was published at the ICFP 2011 conference [27] .