In Racket, programmers can create powerful abstractions by bundling together a family of values, functions, and syntax extensions in the form of a new language. These languages, however, are typically untyped. Turnstile is a new Racket {library,language} for creating typed languages by integrating type checking with Racket’s existing tools for describing languages. The technique is described by fellow PRL’ers in the paper Type Systems as Macros.

Racket encourages language developers to take full advantage of linguistic reuse by defining new language forms in terms of existing constructs. Unsurprisingly, language extensions often retain some of the Racket-y flavor from the underlying constructs. Implementors save time and energy while users of the language benefit from the familiarity they already have with the Racket ecosystem.

Unfortunately, Turnstile does not lend itself to expressing one of Racket’s most ubiquitous idioms: naming local bindings with define. Early experience reports from Turnstile, including my own, suggest that language implementors very much desire to include define-like binding forms in their languages.

This blog post provides a brief overview of what Turnstile is and how it works, an introduction to defining typed language forms, and how to equip these languages with a define binding form.

A short guide to Redex concepts, conventions, and common mistakes.

The PL Junior Seminar is for beginning PhD and interested undergrad and masters students to understand the foundations of programming languages research. It serves to fill in background knowledge and get up to speed with different areas of PL research.

For the spring 2017 instance of PL Junior we chose program synthesis, the sequent calculus, and logic programming as topics we wanted to learn more about. We also did two group paper readings for Luca Cardelli’s Typeful Programming and Alan Kay’s Early History of Smalltalk. At the same time, we changed up the format from the previous semester.

The Programming Language Seminar, Junior (or “PL Junior”), is a seminar for junior students to learn and discuss topics at a pace more suitable to our background. This semester, we decided to study dependent types. We chose this topic because

1. working from the TAPL presentation of type systems, dependent types are a step up in difficulty (excepting F-omega-sub), and
2. they represent a significant increase in the reasoning power of types over programs.