COMP 150FP-Advanced Functional Programming
Spring 2009

Overview

• Promote construction of safe, reusable abstractions
• Provide unusually powerful, expressive means of composing existing abstractions to make new abstractions
• Help flush out many trivial bugs without getting in the programmer's way

Functional programming is also the wellspring of new ideas which eventually find their way into other languages. COMP 150FP is called Advanced Functional Programming because

• It will take you to the frontier of research and help you identify the interesting ideas and the important problems which will influence the languages of the future.
• It will also give you a chance to practice the best techniques used by functional programmers, so you can use them in your work.

COMP 150FP will focus on Haskell, which encompasses most of the interesting ideas of the field. These ideas range from the first stirrings articulated by John Backus in his 1977 Turing Award Lecture to the latest developments in type systems and type functions.

COMP 150FP will be run as a seminar; participants will meet twice weekly for intensive discussion. To allow time for introduction, discussion, and post-discussion analysis, each meeting will last two hours. A typical discussion will focus on one or two papers. To help shape the course, the papers will support two themes:

• Lazy evaluation and string processing
• Programming at the type level

It is unsatisfying to read about programming-language features without using them. We will therefore write some code using the languages and features we study. Some class time will be used to present, analyze, and refine some of this code. Depending on the interests and background of the participants, programming may involve either a series of unrelated problems or a project of significant scope.

Students' grades will be based primarily on their preparedness for and contributions to our class sessions. Written and oral presentations of programming work will also influence the final grade.

Prerequisite: COMP 80 or a comparable survey course briefly covering functional programming, or graduate standing, or permission of the instructor. Enrollment will be limited to 20.

Resources

• Code for the DVD packing problem may be obtained by

    git clone http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/150FP/dvdpacking
  

  This should work from any departmental server, or from your own computer provided you've installed git.
• Here is an updated version Hutton and Meijer's monadic parsing library.