On October 9, 2012, Prof. Dr. Martin Erwig from the Oregon State University, USA, will give a talk about "Type Inference for Variational Programs" in the context of the SFB 901 colloquium.
Abstract:
Through the use of conditional compilation and related tools, software projects can generate a huge
number of related programs. The problem of typing such variational software is very difficult. The
brute-force strategy of generating all variants and typing each one individually is usually infeasible
for efficiency reasons. Moreover, it produces results that do not map well to the underlying
variational program. The choice calculus is a formal model for the systematic representation of variation
in software that supports, in addition to the selection of individual variants, the desing, querying, and
transformation of variation structures. Using the choice calculus as a variation representation, the typing
problem for variational software can be addressed by inferring variational types for variational programs
such that each program variant selected from the variational program has the corresponding type variant
selected from the inferred variational type. In this talk I will first give a short overview of the essential features
of the choice calculus and then talk about the problem of variational type inference. Beyond solving the
variational typing problem, the shown techniques provide support for a wide range of other static analysis
tasks for variational software.