Lecturer: Andrew Tolmach  

Affiliation: Professor at Portland State University, and Digiteo chair  

TItle: A Theory of Name Resolution  

Abstract:  Name resolution is pervasive in programming language design and implementation, but it has not received proper attention as an independent task.  This talk will describe a new language-independent approach to defining program binding structure and name resolution, suitable for languages with complex scoping rules including both lexical scoping and modules. The approach is based on scope graphs, a simple, language-independent, and easily visualized representation of program binding structure.   The talk will give a gentle introduction to scope graphs by means of examples, and describe the language-independent resolution theory and tools that they enable.   (Joint work with Pierre Neron, Eelco Visser and Guido Wachsmuth at Technical University of Delft.)  

Short bio:  Andrew Tolmach is Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, and holds a Digiteo Chair at Université Paris-Sud for the 2014-15 year.  His interests are in programming languages, verification, compilers, tools, and applications. His current research is focused on on proof engineering and high-assurance systems software development. His past publications, mostly about functional languages, include work on debugger implementation, garbage collection, compilation, integration with logic languages, and lazy functional algorithms.