Award Abstract #9901011
Typed Common Intermediate Format

NSF Org:	CCF Division of Computer and Communication Foundations
Initial Amendment Date:	July 29, 1999
Latest Amendment Date:	April 5, 2001
Award Number:	9901011
Award Instrument:	Continuing grant
Program Manager:	Jon S. Rugaber CCF Division of Computer and Communication Foundations CSE Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering
Start Date:	August 1, 1999
Expires:	July 31, 2002 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$320000
Investigator(s):	Zhong Shao shao@cs.yale.edu (Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	Yale University P.O. Box 208337 NEW HAVEN, CT 06520 203/432-2460
NSF Program(s):	SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND LANGU, DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
Field Application(s):	0000099 Other Applications NEC
Program Reference Code(s):	HPCC, 9216
Program Element Code(s):	2880, 2876

ABSTRACT

9901011 Zhang Shao

The main objective of this research is to design and develop a typed common intermediate format (named FLINT) for multiple advanced programming languages. FLINT is based on an extended variant of the polymorphic lambda calculus Fomega. Although advanced languages can be very different in semantics, they all have a mathematically rigorous type system. FLINT provides a common compiler backend that can be quickly adapted to generate compilers for new languages. With its unified type system, FLINT serves as a great platform for reasoning about cross-language interoperations. Previous work on FLINT was done in the context of ML. This proposed research will extend FLINT to support other language features such as classes and objects in Java, type dynamic in Scheme, lazy evaluation and type classes in Haskell, and various system-programming primitives in C and Modula-3. The goal is to achieve safe, principled, and fine-grain language interoperation between different advanced languages and with C and assembly code.

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