Author: James Noble

James Noble

Ever Onward!

EVER ONWARD — EVER ONWARD!
That’s the spirit that has brought us fame!
We’re big, but bigger we will be
We can’t fail for all can see
That to serve humanity has been our aim!
Our products now are known, in every zone,
Our reputation sparkles like a gem!
We’ve fought our way through — and new
Fields we’re sure to conquer too
For the EVER ONWARD I.B.M.

Keeping up the blog has not been one of our strong points, but we have been making some progress in the last few months. We’ve been working our way through a review of Grace’s design and specification, with a few nontrivial changes:

  • Classes create methods, rather than objects, so no longer have “dots” in their name
  • Calling methods in superclasses relies on aliasing, not “super requests”
  • Traits support stateless reusable components
  • A simpler inheritance model that supports classes inheriting from multiple traits
  • Replacing variadic methods with primitive sequences

We expect to describe these changes in a few blog posts soon, as we are working through a thoroughly revised specification.  We plan to release the specification and implementations around the end of February,  for feedback from the community. We then plan to hold workshops (as we did in 2011) to go over what we hope will get getting close to a 1.0 version of the language design. So: Onward! Ever Onward!

James Noble

Grace at ECOOP

The European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming starts next month, and, once again Grace people will be there.

 

Andrew Black Tim Jones Kim Bruce

 

On Sunday, the first workshop day, Andrew Black will discuss
The Expression Problem, Gracefully in the MASPEGHI workshop.

On Wednesday, the first day of the full conference, Tim Jones will present the technical paper Brand Objects for Nominal Typing by Tim Jones et al which describes how Grace can be extended to support nominal typing. Tim is also charing the ECOOP Doctoral Symposium this year.

On Thursday, Kim Bruce is presenting the talk Graceful Programming — Teaching Introductory Programming as part of the ECOOP Summer School.

Update:  Materials from the tutorial, including slides, documentation, sample programs, and homework exercises can be found at http://www.cs.pomona.edu/~kim/GraceStuff/GraceTutorial.html

James Noble

Visitors to Victoria for Winter 2015

Early this month we were pleased to welcome a couple of visitors to Wellington working on Grace projects.

Satu Itaniemi         Tom Dupisre

Satu Itaniemi is joining us from Finland via the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg to write her Master’s thesis on DSL-based frameworks for accounting systems.

Tom Dupisre is visiting us for three months from the École Polytechnique de l’Université de Nantes to work on Grace benchmarks and libraries.

James Noble

Grace at ECOOP

The European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming starts tomorrow, and Grace people will be there.

On Wednesday, the first day of the full conference, we’ll present the technical paper Graceful Dialects by Michael Homer et al describes how Grace supports dialects using lexical scope, pluggable checkers, and Grace’s flexible syntax, but without requiring macros or depending on types.

At workshops held earlier in the week, Tim Jones will talk about TinygraceA Rational Reconstruction of the Escrow Example — rewriting everything in Grace always being perfectly rational — both at the Formal Techniques for Java-like Languages workshop on Monday,

And at IWACO on Tuesday, James will present On Owners as Accessors with some examples, at least, tending towards Grace.