Monadic combinators for "Putback" style bidirectional programming

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2014

Authors

Pacheco, H (Author) Other; Hu, Z (Author) Other; Fischer, S (Author) Other

Conference proceedings International

Title: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2014 workshop on Partial evaluation and program manipulation, PEPM 2014, January 20-21, 2014, San Diego, California, USA

Pages: 39-50

ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation, PEPM 2014 - Co-located with POPL 2014

San Diego, CA, 20 January 2014 through 21 January 2014

Indexing

Scopus - 33 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00K-HQE

DOI: 10.1145/2543728.2543737

Abstract (EN): Bidirectional transformations, in particular lenses, are programs with a forward get transformation and a backward putback transformation that keep source and view data types synchronized. Several bidirectional programming languages exist to aid programmers in writing a (sort of) forward transformation, and deriving a backward transformation for free. However, the maintainability offered by such languages comes at the cost of expressiveness and (more importantly) predictability because the ambiguity of synchronization -handled by the putback transformation- is solved by default strategies over which programmers have little control. In this paper, we argue that controlling such ambiguity is essential for bidirectional transformations and propose a novel language in which programmers write a (sort of) putback transformation, and get the unique get transformation for free. Like traditional bidirectional languages, our put-oriented language allows reasoning about the correctness of defined transformations from the properties of their building blocks. But it allows programmers to describe the behavior of a bidirectional transformation much more precisely, while retaining the maintainability of writing a single program. We demonstrate the practical power of the new approach through a series of examples, ranging from simple ones that illustrate traditional lenses to complex ones for which our putback-based approach is central to specifying nontrivial update strategies. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.1.1 [Programming Techniques]: Applicative (Functional) Programming; D.3.1 [Programming Languages]: Formal Definitions and Theory; F.3.2 [Logics and Meanings of Programs]: Semantics of Programming Languages-Algebraic approaches to semantics.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific