Sunday, October 3, 1999   [Monday]  [Tuesday]

8:30 am - 8:45 am Opening Remarks

Thomas Ball, Program Chair, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies

8:45 am - 10:00 am Keynote Address

Towards More Natural Domain-Specific Languages

Brad A. Myers, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University


Most textual domain-specific languages were adapted from existing programming languages or were based on the intuition of the designer. The Natural Programming Project is developing general principles, methods, programming language designs, and environments that will provide a more scientific basis on which to base these designs, when the goal is a language that is easy to learn and effective for use by people who are not professional programmers. This talk will provide an overview of the Natural Programming approach and our results so far.

Brad A. Myers is a Senior Research Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the principal investigator for various projects, including User Interface Software, Demonstrational Interfaces, Natural Programming, and the Pebbles PalmPilot Project. He is the author or editor of over 180 publications, including "Creating User Interfaces by Demonstration" and "Languages for Developing User Interfaces," and he is on the editorial board of five journals. His research interests include User Interface Development Systems, user interfaces, Programming by Example, programming languages for kids, Visual Programming, interaction techniques, window management, and programming environments. He belongs to SIGCHI, ACM, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE, and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

10:00 am - 10:30 am Break

10:30 am - 12:00 pm Testing and Experience Reports

Session Chair: James R. Larus, Microsoft Research

Using Production Grammars in Software Testing
Emin Guün Sirer and Brian N. Bershad, University of Washington

Jargons for Domain Engineering
Lloyd H. Nakatani, Mark A. Ardis, Robert G. Olsen, and Paul M. Pontrelli, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies

Slicing Spreadsheets: An Integrated Methodology for Spreadsheet Testing and Debugging
James Reichwein, Gregg Rothermel, and Margaret Burnett, Oregon State University

12:00 pm - 1:30 pm Conference Luncheon

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Hot Research Review

Session Chair: Charles Consel, Irisa/University of Rennes

Domain-Specific Languages for Programming and Security in Active Networks

Carl A. Gunter, University of Pennsylvania

Active networks allow routing elements to be programmed by the packets passing through them., thereby enabling optimizations and extensions of current protocols as well as the development of fundamentally new protocols. To realize this flexibility, it is essential to provide models for programming and security that are easy to use while providing acceptable performance. In this lecture I will look at how domain-specific languages for programming active networks and describing security policies can be used to control global computation, avoid costly cryptographic operations, and enable formal specification and verification of essential properties.

Carl A. Gunter does research in the areas of programming languages and software engineering. He has contributed to foundations for the semantics of programming languages, type systems, and the design of programming languages. His research has also included contributions on computational logic, the representation of partial information, and mathematical models of software configuration dependencies. His current work focuses on active networks, security infrastructure systems, formal methods in software engineering, and liability analysis of software agreements and accidents.

3:00 pm - 3:30 pm Break

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm Optimization and Extensibility

Session Chair: Mary Fernández, AT&T Labs--Research

An Annotation Language for Optimizing Software Libraries
Samuel Z. Guyer and Calvin Lin, University of Texas at Austin

A Case for Source-Level Transformations in MATLAB
Vijay Menon and Keshav Pingali, Cornell University

Using Java Reflection to Automate Extension Language Parsing
Dale E. Parson, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies

8:00 pm - 11:00 pm Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions

Monday, October 4, 1999   [Sunday]  [Tuesday]

8:45 am - 10:00 am Invited Talk

Language Technology for Performance and Security, or, Making Life Better, Not Just Easier

Peter Lee, Carnegie Mellon University and Cedilla Systems Incorporated


Modern languages strive to make programming easier. However, the real importance of modern language technology does not lie merely in ease of use. The same design principles that enable programs to be constructed more easily also lead to improved performance and safety. In order to illustrate this, I will give an introduction to proof-carrying code. PCC allows exceptionally high levels of performance and safety but for practical reasons depends critically on the design principles that underlie better languages for programmers.

Peter Lee is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His approach of applying theoretical ideas in programming language design to practical systems has led to numerous research contributions in the areas of programming language design, compiler technology, networking, and operating systems. Most recently, he has focused his attention on developing Proof-Carrying Code, a technique which uses program verification to enhance the performance and safety of mobile code. He is a principal investigator for the DARPA-sponsored Fox Project and is also the co-founder and president of Cedilla Systems Incorporated.

10:00 am - 10:30 am Break

10:30 am - 11:45 am DSLs and Monads

Session Chair: Paul Hudak, Yale University

DSL Implementation Using Staging and Monads
Tim Sheard, Zine-el-abidine Benaissa, and Emir Pasalic, Oregon Graduate Institute

Monadic Robotics
John Peterson, Yale University, and Greg Hager, The Johns Hopkins University

11:45 am - 1:30 pm Lunch (on your own)

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm Hot Research Review

Session Chair: Todd Proebsting, Microsoft Research

A Methodology for Designing Domain-Specific Languages Using Program Specialization

Charles Consel, Irisa/University of Rennes


Domain-specific languages are mainly being developed in isolation. Furthermore, the difficult task of designing, structuring, and implementing a DSL requires expertise in multiple areas. DSLs can succeed only if development methodologies and tools are made available.

In this talk I give an overview of a methodology for developing DSLs. I also demonstrate how program specialization can map DSL interpreters into efficient (possibly just-in-time) compilers. The presentation is illustrated by concrete examples.

Charles Consel is a professor of computer science at the University of Rennes Irisa/Inria. He leads the Compose group at Inria. His group studies partial evaluation, a program transformation approach aimed at specializing programs with respect to given execution contexts. The work has been carried out with a program specializer for C called Tempo. This system has been successfully used in various applications such as operating systems and scientific code. A complementary research project is domain-specific languages: a software development approach that provides high productivity, easy maintenance, and improved safety (without giving up perfor-mance, thanks to partial evaluation). His work on programming languages, software engineering, and operating systems has led to many publications in major conferences and journals (POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA, ASE, SOSP, TOPLAS, ACM Surveys).

3:00 pm - 3:30 pm Break

3:30 pm - 4:30 pm Embedded Languages

Session Chair: Michael Schwartzbach, University of Aarhus

Domain-Specific Embedded Compilers
Daan Leijen and Erik Meijer, University of Utrecht

Verischemelog: Verilog Embedded in Scheme
James Jennings and Eric Beuscher, Tulane University

6:00 pm - 7:00 pm Conference Reception

8:00 pm - 11:00 pm Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions

Tuesday, October 5, 1999   [Sunday]  [Monday]

8:45 am - 10:00 am Invited Talk

The Next 700 Markup Languages

Philip Wadler, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies


XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a magnet for hype: the successor to HTML for Web publishing, electronic data interchange, and e-commerce. In fact, XML is little more than a notation for trees and for tree grammars, a verbose variant of Lisp S-expressions coupled with a poor man's BNF (Backus-Naur form). Yet this simple basis has spawned scores of specialized sublanguages: for airlines, banks, and cell phones; for astronomy, biology, and chemistry; for the DOD and the IRS. Domain-specific languages indeed! There is much for the language designer to contribute here. As all this is based on a sort of S-expression, is there a role for a sort of Lisp?

Philip Wadler is a researcher at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. He is co-designer of the languages Haskell, Pizza, and GJ. He likes to spend his time on the border between theory and practice, looking for ways to use one to inform the other. He helped turn monads from a concept in algebraic topology into a way to structure programs in Haskell, and his work on GJ may help turn quantifiers in second-order logic into a feature of the Java programming language. He edits the "Journal of Functional Programming" for Cambridge University Press and writes a column for "SIGPLAN Notices." He was an ACM distinguished lecturer 1989-1993 and has been an invited speaker at conferences in Boulder, Brest, Gdansk, London, Montreal, New Haven, Portland, Santa Fe, Sydney, and Victoria.

10:00 am - 10:30 am Break

10:30 am - 12:00 pm The Web, Data, and Collaboration

Session Chair: Jay Lepreau, University of Utah

Declarative Specification of Data-Intensive Web Sites
Mary Fernández and Dan Suciu, AT&T Labs--Research; Igor Tatarinov, North Dakota State University

A Collaboration Specification Language
Du Li and Richard R. Muntz, University of California, Los Angeles

Hancock: A Language for Processing Very Large-Scale Data
Dan Bonachea, University of California, Berkeley; Kathleen Fisher and Anne Rogers, AT&T Labs--Shannon Laboratory; Frederick Smith Cornell University

[Sunday, October 3]  [Monday, October 4]  [Tuesday, October 5]