Introduction

The workshop on Mathematically Structured Functional Programming is devoted to the derivation of functionality from structure. It is a celebration of the direct impact of Theoretical Computer Science on programs as we write them today. Modern programming languages, and in particular functional languages, support the direct expression of mathematical structures, equipping programmers with tools of remarkable power and abstraction. Monadic programming in Haskell is the paradigmatic example, but there are many more mathematical insights manifest in programs and in programming language design: Freyd-categories in reactive programming, symbolic differentiation yielding context structures, and comonadic presentations of dataflow, to name but three. This workshop is a forum for researchers who seek to reflect mathematical phenomena in data and control.

Where and when?

MSFP 2008 will be held on 6 July. This time around, we're delighted to be a part of ICALP 2008, running 6-13 July at Reykjavik University, Iceland.

Schedule

09.00 Invited Talk   Mathematically Structured but not Necessarily Functional Programming
Andrej Bauer of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of Ljubljana, the Institute of mathematics, physics and mechanics, Slovenia, and the Mathematics and Computation weblog
10.00 A Partial Type Checking Algorithm for System U
Andreas Abel and Thorsten Altenkirch
10.30 Coffee
11.00 What is a Categorical Model of Arrows?
Robert Atkey
11.30 Modularity and Implementation of Mathematical Operational Semantics
Mauro Jaskelioff, Neil Ghani, and Graham Hutton
12.00 Idioms are oblivious, arrows are meticulous, monads are promiscuous
Sam Lindley, Jeremy Yallop, and Philip Wadler
12.30 Lunch
14.00 Invited Talk   Some elementary algebra and calculus of types and "antidiagonal" types
Academy Award winner, Dan Piponi of Industrial Light and Magic, and A Neighbourhood of Infinity
15.00 Algebraic Specialization of Generic Functions for Recursive Types
Alcino Cunha and Hugo Pacheco
15.30 Coffee
16.00 Yet another implementation of attribute evaluation
Eric Badouel, Bernard Fotsing, and Rodrigue Tchougong
16.30 Simulating Finite Eilenberg Machines with a Reactive Engine
Benoit Razet
17.00 The recursion scheme from the cofree recursive comonad
Tarmo Uustalu and Varmo Vene
17.30 Close

Topics

Submission is now closed. Submissions were welcome on, but by no means restricted to, topics such as:

  • structured effectful computation
  • structured recursion
  • structured corecursion
  • structured tree and graph operations
  • structured syntax with variable binding
  • structured datatype-genericity
  • structured search
  • structured representations of functions
  • structured quantum computation
  • structured structure

Authors concerned about the suitability of a topic are very welcome to contact Conor McBride, ctm(at)strictlypositive(dot)org.

Submission and Publication

Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science have provisionally agreed to publish the proceedings of MSFP 2008. ENTCS require submissions in LaTeX, formatted according to their guidelines.

Papers must report previously unpublished work and not be submitted concurrently to another conference with refereed proceedings. Programme Committee members, barring the co-chairs, may (and indeed are encouraged) to contribute. Accepted papers must be presented at the workshop by one of the authors.

Timeline

Whilst recognizing that modern life is full of stress, we should very much prefer if contributors could respect the following timeline.

Submission of abstracts4 April
Submission of papers11 April
Notification16 May
Final versions due13 June
Workshop6 July

The Programme Committee will attempt to oblige in return.

Programme Committee

  • Yves Bertot, INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis
  • Venanzio Capretta (co-chair), Radboud University, Nijmegen
  • Jacques Carette, McMaster University, Ontario
  • Thierry Coquand, Chalmers University, Göteborg
  • Andrzej Filinski, Københavns Universitet
  • Jean-Christophe Filliâtre, LRI, Université Paris Sud
  • Jeremy Gibbons, Oxford University
  • Andy Gill, Galois
  • Peter Hancock, University of Nottingham
  • Oleg Kiselyov, FNMOC
  • Paul Blain Levy, University of Birmingham
  • Andres Löh, Utrecht University
  • Marino Miculan, Università di Udine
  • Conor McBride (co-chair), Alta Systems, Northern Ireland
  • James McKinna, Radboud University, Nijmegen
  • Alex Simpson, University of Edinburgh
  • Tarmo Uustalu, Institute of Cybernetics, Tallinn

Previous MSFP Workshop

The inaugural MSFP Workshop was held in July 2006, in Kuressaare, Estonia, a fine curtain-raiser for MPC and AMAST. It was organized by Conor McBride and Tarmo Uustalu, and featured invited talks from John Power and Andrzej Filinski. If you weren't there, you really missed a lovely day. The proceedings were published in the British Computer Society's "Electronic Workshops in Computing" series, available online.

Revised selected papers (with a full re-refereeing process) will be appearing as a special issue of the Journal of Functional Programming.