Tillmann Rendel

Tillmann Rendel aarhus university daimi pl & fm group klaus ostermann

I am PhD student at DAIMI, the Computer Science Department of Aarhus University, in the Programming Languages and Formal Methods group. My supervisor is Klaus Ostermann.

Contact

Contact

Tillmann Rendel
Department of Computer Science
Aarhus University

Research

I am interested in programming languages so flexible and expressive, that they can be extended by mere libraries to yield new languages, which traditionally would have been implemented from scratch. Which abstraction mechanisms are useful for this kind of embedded languages? How far can static typing go with this degree of flexibility? Can a tower of languages implemented on top each other avoid the interpretative overhead? How does existing language concepts interact with these goals?

project page

Polymorphic Embedding.

The usual methodology of embedding domain-specific languages (DSLs) as libraries forces the DSL designer to commit to a single semantics. This precludes the subsequent addition of compilation, optimization or domain-specific analyses. We propose polymorphic embedding of DSLs, where many different interpretations of a DSL can be provided as reusable components, and show how polymorphic embedding can be realized in the programming language Scala. With polymorphic embedding, the static type-safety, modularity, composability and rapid prototyping of the embedded approach are reconciled with the flexibility attainable by external toolchains.

project page

Typed Self-Representation.

We explore the theoretical limits of statically typed embedding by studying typed lambda calculi which allow to embed themself including their own type-system. In fact, we propose the Fω* calculus as a possible base for host languages because it allows such a metacircular embedding. We believe that metacircular embedding plays a similar role for statically typed languages as metacircular interpretation for untyped languages.

Teaching

dProgSprog Ressources

Publications