Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 17:57:13 -0800 From: michael.j.healy@boeing.com (Michael J. Healy 425-865-3123) Subject: categories: Industrial application mailing list of category theory Today, my colleague Keith Williamson demonstrated an "industrial-strength" application of category theory. He applied The Kestrel Institute's Specware(TM) system to generate a fairly large program from formal specifications. The program optimizes the placement of electrical equipment in an airliner, minimizing wiring subject to constraints on how the equipment can be placed. This is a demonstration of applied research, not yet in technology transfer. That having been said, the engineers are finding the program Keith generated to be potentially of great use. Of more significance, though, is their interest in the way the program was developed: It can be either improved or adapted to other applications by modifying specifications and diagrams of specification morphisms, and then replaying the software generation---as opposed to having to work with the code. Efficiency improvements to the code have already been demonstrated by working in this mode. Our slogan is "Re-use specifications, not software". Date: Sat, 12 Jul 1997 14:57:22 -0300 (ADT) Subject: Interesting item for categories Date: Fri, 11 Jul 1997 18:41:36 -0400 From: Michael Barr I just got this from Adam. I think it might be interesting to post. Mike >From adamba@microsoft.com Fri Jul 11 14:09:13 1997 Received: from mail5.microsoft.com (mail5.microsoft.com [131.107.3.31]) by triples.math.mcgill.ca (8.6.8/8.6.6) with ESMTP id OAA04707 for ; Fri, 11 Jul 1997 14:09:12 -0400 Received: by mail5.microsoft.com with Internet Mail Service (5.0.1458.49) id <3W9L4D7D>; Fri, 11 Jul 1997 11:16:22 -0700 Message-ID: <9D311811F5DFD011A37800805FD4BA8803A91B@RED-66-MSG.dns.microsoft.com> From: "Adam Barr (Win NT)" To: "'barr@triples.math.mcgill.ca'" Subject: lecture abstract Date: Fri, 11 Jul 1997 11:14:29 -0700 X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.0.1458.49) Status: R This is a talk at Microsoft -- the abstract mentions category theory!! - adam ************************************************************************ ******** WHO: Erik Meijer AFFILIATION: Utrecht University, The Netherlands TITLE: The Next 700 Scripting Languages, or COM meets Functional Programming WHEN: Wednesday July 16, 1997 WHERE: 9s/1007 TIME: 3:00-4:30 HOST: Conal Elliott VIDEO Not Available ************************************************************************ ******* Please pass on this information to any other interested internal employees. The Next 700 Scripting Languages, or COM meets Functional Programming More than 30 years ago, Peter Landin proposed to define domain specific languages by embedding them into the purely functional host language ISWIM. The host language captures how things are described in terms of other things, and is specialized for a certain problem domain by an appropriate choice of primitive operations. In 1997-speak, we would say that Landin proposed to have a single scripting language to glue together application specific software components. This is very similar to using Visual Basic for scripting COM/ActiveX components. For a purely functional language however, it is easier said than done; especially if we want to introduce impure, side-effecting, primitives. Surprisingly, it turns out that the concept of monads from category theory provides an elegant solution to the problem of integrating interaction in a purely functional language. Finally, after 30 years, Landin's idea can be put into practice, and Fran, Haskell/CGI, Haskore, Tk/Gofer, AgentScript, and the Haskell-COM integration are collectively becoming a nice proof of concept. In this talk we will argue why we think lazy functional language (such as Haskell) are especially suited as scripting languages as they allow users to define their own control structures, or as we say, combinators. During the talk, the Microsoft Agent genie will navigate the Microsoft internet Explorer through a tour of dynamically generated HTML pages, everything scripted in Haskell. Biography ======= Erik Meijer is currently a visiting research professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute, on leave from Utrecht University in The Netherlands. He is known from his theoretical work on functional programming (Squiggol) and compiler construction, but now spends his time on practical applications of functional programming, especially promoting them as scripting languages. He is recently working on making COM components available from Haskell and encapsulating Haskell programs as COM components, and is a member of the Standard Haskell Committee. Home Page : http://tibet.cse.ogi.edu/Personal/Default.html" . msrlecture