Functional programming

In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that map values to other values, rather than a sequence of imperative statements which update the running state of the program. In functional programming, functions are treated as first-class citizens, meaning that they can be bound to names (including local identifiers), passed as arguments, and returned from other functions, just as any other data type can. This allows programs to be written in a declarative and composable style, where small functions are combined in a modular manner. Functional programming is sometimes treated as synonymous with purely functional programming, a subset of functional programming which treats all functions as deterministic mathematical functions, or pure functions. When a pure function is called with some given argumen

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Lisp (historically LISP, an acronym for list processing) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1960,

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Programming language abstractions for mobile code

Stéphane Micheloud

Scala is a general-purpose programming language developed at EPFL. It combines the most important concepts found in object-oriented and functional languages. Scala is a statically typed language; in particular it features an advanced type system and supports local type inference. Furthermore it integrates well with the Java and .net platforms: their libraries are accessible without glue code and the Scala compiler generates code for both execution environments. The Scala programming language has several features that make it desirable as a language for distributed application programming. In particular, it supports first-class functions which are useful in relation with the notions of distributed scope and code mobility. In that context, the missing support for run-time types is one important drawback of the Java run-time environment as a target platform. This thesis focuses on the realisation of a new concept combining essential notions from the functional and distributed programming and implying the extension of the notion of lexical scoping to the distributed context. In short, we claim that the notion of lambda abstraction provides an elegant way for dealing with the dynamic rebinding of local references in a distributed execution environment. The key ideas exposed in this research work have been implemented in our Scala compiler. This helped us to evaluate the used techniques, in particular their impact on the reliability and the performance of distributed programs. So far, most research works related to the present subject have focused on functional programming languages, in particular on the ML language family.

EPFL2009

Contracts for Real-Time, Safety Critical Systems

Chandrakana Nandi

Verifying real-time systems goes beyond the verification of functional properties: it also requires the checking of real-time properties. This makes traditional contract-frameworks partially inept for checking real-time programs. This is a major problem because the failure of real-time and safety critical systems can have serious consequences. This thesis presents a solution to this problem by incorporating Design by Contract (annotating programs with function pre and post conditions) to such systems. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of a contract framework for cyclic real-time control applications written in C++. The contract framework allows the users to specify both functional and temporal properties for the applications. A novel approach of empirical cumulative distribution function (cdf ) based statistical inference is used for dynamically estimating temporal constraints and incorporating them in future contracts. The thesis also illustrates the use of Real-time Logic (RTL) for formal specification of the temporal properties. For evaluating our methodology, we have integrated it to a component-based framework called FASA (Future Automation System Architecture) developed at ABB Corporate Research for writing hard real time control applications. Experiments show that this contract framework can be smoothly integrated to existing control applications thereby increasing their reliability while having a acceptable overhead (less than 10%) on the performance.

2014

Function Passing: A Model for Typed, Distributed Functional Programming

Jocelyn Boullier, Philipp Haller

The most successful systems for “big data” processing have all adopted functional APIs. We present a new programming model we call function passing designed to provide a more principled substrate on which to build data-centric distributed systems. A key idea is to build up a persistent functional data structure representing transformations on distributed immutable data by passing well-typed serializable functions over the wire and applying them to this distributed data. Thus, the function passing model can be thought of as a persistent functional data structure that is distributed, where transformations to data are stored in its nodes rather than the distributed data itself. The model simplifies failure recovery by design–data is recovered by replaying function applications atop immutable data loaded from stable storage. Deferred evaluation is also central to our model; by incorporating deferred evaluation into our design only at the point of initiating network communication, the function passing model remains easy to reason about while remaining efficient in time and memory. We formalize our programming model in the form of a small-step operational semantics which includes a semantics of functional fault recovery, and we provide an open-source implementation of our model in and for the Scala programming language, along with a case study of several example frameworks and end-user programs written atop of this model.

Assoc Computing Machinery2016

CS-210: Functional programming

Understanding of the principles and applications of functional programming, the fundamental models of program execution, application of fundamental methods of program composition, meta-programming through the construction of interpreters and advanced programming techniques.

AR-340: Building technology V

Technologie du Bâti V aborde le bâtiment comme un système d'opérations techniques et culturelles invoquant des choix liés à l'environnement, au matériau, à la structure, et au montage. L'objectif du cours est d'amener les étudiants à acquérir des compétences sur la conception critique du bâtiment.

MATH-302: Functional analysis I

Concepts de base de l'analyse fonctionnelle linéaire: opérateurs bornés, opérateurs compacts, théorie spectrale pour les opérateurs symétriques et compacts, le théorème de Hahn-Banach, les théorèmes de l'application ouverte et du graphe fermé.