Tomas Petricek's Publications

Searching for new ways of thinking in programming & working with data

I'm a visiting researcher at the Alan Turing Institute working on tools for data-driven storytelling. I also work closely with the F# team in Microsoft Research and I recently submitted my PhD thesis at University of Cambridge. If you read 3 of my papers, consider the following ones!

Type Providers

F# Data infers types from sample XML and JSON documents and safely embed them into F#. Our PLDI 2016 paper is an ACM SIGPLAN Research Highligt.

Coeffects

Coeffects are theory of context-aware programming languages developed in my PhD thesis. Check out our ICFP 2014 paper or my interactive essay.

Philosophy

How different communities approach errors? My paper on history and philosophy of errors published in ‹Programming› 2017 was selected as reviewers choice.

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Coeffects A calculus of context-dependent computation

Tomas Petricek, Dominic Orchard and Alan Mycroft

In Proceedings of ICFP 2014

The notion of context in functional languages no longer refers just to variables in scope. Context can capture additional properties of variables (usage patterns in linear logics; caching requirements in dataflow languages) as well as additional resources or properties of the execution environment (rebindable resources; platform version in a
cross-platform application). The recently introduced notion of coeffects captures the latter, whole-context properties, but it failed to capture fine-grained per-variable properties.

We remedy this by developing a generalized coeffect system with annotations indexed by a coeffect shape. By instantiating a concrete shape, our system captures previously studied flat (whole-context) coeffects, but also structural (per-variable) coeffects, making coeffect analyses more useful. We show that the structural system enjoys desirable syntactic properties and we give a categorical semantics using extended notions of indexed comonad.

The examples presented in this paper are based on analysis of established language features (liveness, linear logics, dataflow, dynamic scoping) and we argue that such context-aware properties will also be useful for future development of languages for increasingly heterogeneous and distributed platforms.

Watch the talk

Thanks to the ICFP workshop organizers, the video from my talk, Coeffects: A Calculus of Context-Dependent Computation is on YouTube!

Paper and more information

  • Download the paper (PDF)
  • This work extends our previous ICALP paper

Bibtex

If you want to cite the paper, you can use the following BibTeX information, or get full details from the paper paper page on ACM.

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@inproceedings{coeffects-icfp14,
  author    = {Petricek, Tomas and Orchard, Dominic and Mycroft, Alan},
  title     = {Coeffects: A calculus of context-dependent computation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of International Conference on Functional Programming},
  series    = {ICFP 2014},
  location  = {Gothenburg, Sweden}
} 

If you have any comments, suggestions or related ideas, I'll be happy to hear from you! Send me an email at tomas@tomasp.net or get in touch via Twitter at @tomaspetricek.

Published: Friday, 29 August 2014, 12:00 AM
Author: Tomas Petricek
Typos: Send me pull request!

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  • Twitter: @tomaspetricek
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  • Email me: tomas@tomasp.net

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