PhD thesis: Manifest Contracts
I defended my PhD thesis, Manifest Contracts on November 7th, 2013, with the final document submitted on December 6th. Since the doctoral degree shows up on my Penn transcript, I feel comfortable telling the world: I got a PhD! My thesis committee, comprising Stephanie Weirich (the chair), Rajeev Alur, Greg Morrisett, and Steve Zdancewic. Here's the abstract:
Eiffel popularized design by contract, a software design philosophy where programmers specify the requirements and guarantees of functions via executable pre- and post-conditions written in code. Findler and Felleisen brought contracts to higher-order programming, inspiring the PLT Racket implementation of contracts. Existing approaches for runtime checking lack reasoning principles and stop short of their full potential---most Racket contracts check only simple types. Moreover, the standard algorithm for higher-order contract checking can lead to unbounded space consumption and can destroy tail recursion. In this dissertation, I develop so-called manifest contract systems which integrate more coherently in the type system, and relate them to Findler-and-Felleisen-style latent contracts. I extend a manifest system with type abstraction and relational parametricity, and also show how to integrate dynamic types and contracts in a space efficient way, i.e., in a way that doesn't destroy tail recursion. I put manifest contracts on a firm type-theoretic footing, showing that they support extensions necessary for real programming. Developing these principles is the first step in designing and implementing higher-order languages with contracts and refinement types.
I'll be starting as a post-doc with Dave Walker on Monday.