| layout | title | authors | date | venue | categories |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
post |
Object Algebras as Visitors |
Weixin |
2016-01-07 14:00:00 +0800 |
CB 308 |
Weixin 2016 |
Object Algebras are a design pattern for building extensible software, which are essentially an implementation of internal visitors. Internal visitors, however, are inefficient (even impossible) to define certain algebras since it fixes the traversal pattern to be bottom-up. External visitors, on the other hand, adopts top-down traversals are better suited for such algebras.
In this talk, I will first relate Object Algebras to the VISITOR pattern and introduce a generalized encoding of Object Algebras that could be instantiated as either internal or external visitors while retaining extensibility. Then, I will present the Free framework we developed, which generates the infrastructure to ease working with generalized algebras. Last, I will show the case study we conducted for illustrating the strength of our framework, where most of the code from the book "Types and Programming Languages" are rewritten in a modular way.