Free Composition Instead of Language Dictatorship

Lodewijk Bergmans, Steven te Brinke, Christoph Bockisch, Mehmet Akşit

2012

Abstract

Historically, programming languages have been—benevolent—dictators: reducing all possible semantics to specific ones offered by a few built-in language constructs. Over the years, some programming languages have freed the programmers from the restrictions to use only built-in libraries, built-in data types, and builtin type-checking rules. Even though—arguably—such freedom could lead to anarchy, or people shooting themselves in the foot, the contrary tends to be the case: a language that does not allow for extensibility is depriving software engineers of the ability to construct proper abstractions and to structure software in the most optimal way. Therefore the software becomes less structured and maintainable than would be possible if the software engineer could express the behavior of the program with the most appropriate abstractions. The idea proposed by this paper is to move composition from built-in language constructs to programmable, first-class abstractions in a language. We discuss several prototypes of the Co-op language, which show that it is possible, with a relatively simple model, to express a wide range of compositions as first-class concepts.

References

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Bergmans L., te Brinke S., Bockisch C. and Akşit M. (2012). Free Composition Instead of Language Dictatorship . In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Paradigm Trends - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-8565-19-8, pages 388-393. DOI: 10.5220/0004082603880393


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft12,
author={Lodewijk Bergmans and Steven te Brinke and Christoph Bockisch and Mehmet Akşit},
title={Free Composition Instead of Language Dictatorship},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Paradigm Trends - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2012},
pages={388-393},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004082603880393},
isbn={978-989-8565-19-8},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Paradigm Trends - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - Free Composition Instead of Language Dictatorship
SN - 978-989-8565-19-8
AU - Bergmans L.
AU - te Brinke S.
AU - Bockisch C.
AU - Akşit M.
PY - 2012
SP - 388
EP - 393
DO - 10.5220/0004082603880393