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Oh Lord, please don't let contracts be misunderstood (functional pearl)

Published: 04 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Contracts feel misunderstood, especially those with a higher-order soul. While software engineers appreciate contracts as tools for articulating the interface between components, functional programmers desperately search for their types and meaning, completely forgetting about their pragmatics.
This gem presents a novel analysis of contract systems. Applied to the higher-order kind, this analysis reveals their large and clearly unappreciated software engineering potential. Three sample applications illustrate where this kind of exploration may lead.

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  • (2024)Blame-Correct Support for Receiver Properties in Recursively-Structured Actor ContractsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36746438:ICFP(515-543)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICFP 2016: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming
    September 2016
    501 pages
    ISBN:9781450342193
    DOI:10.1145/2951913
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 04 September 2016

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    1. Contracts
    2. Language design
    3. Specifications

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    • (2024)Blame-Correct Support for Receiver Properties in Recursively-Structured Actor ContractsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36746438:ICFP(515-543)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2024
    • (2024)Soft Verification for Actor Contract SystemsProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3685551(1891-1895)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
    • (2024)Effectful Software ContractsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36329308:POPL(2639-2666)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
    • (2023)Trace contractsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682300009633Online publication date: 13-Dec-2023
    • (2022)Summary-Based Compositional Analysis for Soft Contract Verification2022 IEEE 22nd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM55253.2022.00028(186-196)Online publication date: Oct-2022
    • (2021)Linear capabilities for fully abstract compilation of separation-logic-verified codeJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682100002231Online publication date: 30-Mar-2021
    • (2019)Does blame shifting work?Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33711334:POPL(1-29)Online publication date: 20-Dec-2019
    • (2019)First-class dynamic typesProceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages10.1145/3359619.3359740(1-14)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2019
    • (2019)Linear capabilities for fully abstract compilation of separation-logic-verified codeProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33416883:ICFP(1-29)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2019
    • (2018)A programmable programming languageCommunications of the ACM10.1145/312732361:3(62-71)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2018
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