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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/T11715/01
Title: Naming, Distribution and Versioning: Programming Language Design and Implementation
Principal Investigator: Sewell, Professor PM
Other Investigators:
Pitts, Professor AM
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Dr K Wansbrough
Project Partners:
Department: Computer Science and Technology
Organisation: University of Cambridge
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 January 2005 Ends: 30 June 2008 Value (£): 290,010
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Fundamentals of Computing Networks & Distributed Systems
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
In this project we will design and implement high-level programming language support for distributed programming, focussing especially on naming and on issues arising from version change and software evolution in large-scale systems. In recent work we have developed two languages in the ML tradition: for naming we have Fresh OCaml, facilitating programming over data structures with names and name binding; for distributed programming we have Acute, with type-safe and abstraction-safe marshalling of values between programs, rebinding of values to local resource names, and version control of those resources. We propose now to integrate and further develop the two. There are many challenging and intertwined language-design problems that must be solved to develop satisfactory languages for distributed programming: naming of distributed resources and types, marshalling, dynamic linking and versioning, secure encapsulation, local communication, metaprogramming, and control of effects. We will design constructs and semantics for these; implement them, in lightweight prototypes and as patches to the OCaml compiler; and experiment with distributed libraries for communication and security abstractions and with example applications using them.
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Organisation Website: http://www.cam.ac.uk