When type inference fails, it is often difficult to pinpoint the cause of the type error among many potential candidates. Generating informative messages to remove the type error is another difficult task due to the limited availability of type information. Over the last three decades many approaches have been developed...
Producing precise and helpful error messages for type inference is still a challenge for implementations of functional languages. Current approaches often lack precision in terms of locating the origins of type errors. Moreover, suggestions for how to fix type errors that are offered by some tools are also often vague...
Through the use of conditional compilation and related tools, many software projects can be used to generate a huge
number of related programs. The problem of typing such variational software is difficult. The brute-force strategy
of generating all variants and typing each one individually is (1) usually infeasible for efficiency...
We present an explanation-oriented, domain-specific, visual language for explaining probabilistic reasoning. Explanation-oriented programming is a new paradigm that shifts the focus of programming from the computation of results to explanations of how those results were computed. Programs in this language therefore describe explanations of probabilistic reasoning problems. The language relies...
Using spreadsheets is the preferred method to calculate, display or store anything that fits into a table-like structure. They are often used by end users to create applications, although they have one critical drawback—spreadsheets are very error-prone. Recent research has developed methods to reduce this error-proneness by introducing a new...
We introduce a visual specification language for spreadsheets that allows the definition of spreadsheet templates. These templates are used by a spreadsheet generator to create Excel spreadsheets that are probably free from a large class of errors, such as reference, omission, and type errors. We demonstrate how spreadsheets can be...
A huge discrepancy between theory and practice exists in one popular application area of functional programming--spreadsheets. Although spreadsheets are the most frequently used (functional) programs, few formal models of computation and type systems exist that would provide the foundation for creating reliable spreadsheets. Consequently, existing spreadsheets contain many errors, some...
We present a catalog of mutation operators for spreadsheets drawn from research into mutation testing for general purpose programming languages and from spreadsheet errors that have been reported in literature. These operators are integrated into a system, called μTest, which allows users to create and maintain spreadsheet test cases. Three...
The structure of monadic functional programs allows the integration of many different features into such programs by just changing the definition of the monad and not the program, which is a desirable feature from a software engineering and maintenance point of view. We describe an algorithm for the automatic transformation...
We describe the design of a domain-specific language (DSL) for the specification of generic ocean modeling tools, and we describe the
implementation of its compiler. The goal of the DSL is to allow the specification of widely usable tools for ocean modeling once, and to allow its translation into different...