Date of Award

12-2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Dr. Victor Winter

Second Advisor

Dr. Mahadevan Subramaniam

Third Advisor

Dr. Hai-Feng Guo

Fourth Advisor

Dr. Ralf Läammel

Abstract

Rewrite strategies provide an algorithmic rewriting of terms using strategic compositions of rewrite rules. Due to the programmability of rewrites, errors are often made due to incorrect compositions of rewrites or incorrect application of rewrites to a term within a strategic rewriting program. In practical applications of strategic rewriting, testing and debugging becomes substantially time-intensive for large programs applied to large inputs derived from large term grammars. In essence, determining which rewrite in what position in a term did or did not re comes down to logging, tracing and/or di -like comparison of inputs to outputs. In this thesis, we explore type-enabled analysis of strategic rewriting programs to detect errors statically. In particular, we introduce high-precision types to closely approximate the dynamic behavior of rewriting. We also use union types to track sets of types due to presence of strategic compositions. In this framework of high-precision strategic typing, we develop and implement an expressive type system for a representative strategic rewriting language TL. The results of this research are sufficiently broad to be adapted to other strategic rewriting languages. In particular, the type-inferencing algorithm does not require explicit type annotations for minimal impact on an existing language. Based on our experience with the implementation, the type system significantly reduces the time and effort to program correct rewrite strategies while performing the analysis on the order of thousands of source lines of code per second.

Comments

A DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate College at the University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Copyright 2010 Azamat Mametjanov.

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