arXiv subjects

Sandra Dylus

Publications and source records attributed to Sandra Dylus.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2020

Effectful Programming in Declarative Languages with an Emphasis on Non-Determinism: Applications and Formal Reasoning

This thesis investigates effectful declarative programming with an emphasis on non-determinism as an effect. On the one hand, we are interested in developing applications using non-determinism as underlying implementation idea. We discuss two applications using the functional logic programming language Curry. The key idea of these implementations is to exploit the interplay of non-determinism and non-strictness that Curry employs. The first application investigates sorting algorithms parametrised over a comparison function. By applying a non-deterministic predicate to these sorting functions, we gain a permutation enumeration function. We compare the implementation in Curry with an implementation in Haskell that uses a monadic interface to model non-determinism. The other application that we discuss in this work is a library for probabilistic programming. Instead of modelling distributions as list of event and probability pairs, we model distributions using Curry's built-in non-determinism. In both cases we observe that the combination of non-determinism and non-strictness has advantages over an implementation using lists to model non-determinism. On the other hand, we present an idea to apply formal reasoning on effectful declarative programming languages. In order to start with simple effects, we focus on modelling a functional subset first. That is, the effects of interest are totality and partiality. We then observe that the general scheme to model these two effects can be generalised to capture a wide range of effects. Obviously, the next step is to apply the idea to model non-determinism. More precisely, we implement a model for the non-determinism of Curry: non-strict non-determinism with call-time choice. Therefore, we finally discuss why the current representation models call-by-name rather than Curry's call-by-need semantics and give an outlook on ideas to tackle this problem.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2019

Implementing a Library for Probabilistic Programming using Non-strict Non-determinism

This paper presents PFLP, a library for probabilistic programming in the functional logic programming language Curry. It demonstrates how the concepts of a functional logic programming language support the implementation of a library for probabilistic programming. In fact, the paradigms of functional logic and probabilistic programming are closely connected. That is, language characteristics from one area exist in the other and vice versa. For example, the concepts of non-deterministic choice and call-time choice as known from functional logic programming are related to and coincide with stochastic memoization and probabilistic choice in probabilistic programming, respectively. We will further see that an implementation based on the concepts of functional logic programming can have benefits with respect to performance compared to a standard list-based implementation and can even compete with full-blown probabilistic programming languages, which we illustrate by several benchmarks. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

cs.PL↗

arXiv2019

One Monad to Prove Them All

One Monad to Prove Them All is a modern fairy tale about curiosity and perseverance, two important properties of a successful PhD student. We follow the PhD student Mona on her adventure of proving properties about Haskell programs in the proof assistant Coq. On the one hand, as a PhD student in computer science Mona observes an increasing demand for correct software products. In particular, because of the large amount of existing software, verifying existing software products becomes more important. Verifying programs in the functional programming language Haskell is no exception. On the other hand, Mona is delighted to see that communities in the area of theorem proving are becoming popular. Thus, Mona sets out to learn more about the interactive theorem prover Coq and verifying Haskell programs in Coq. To prove properties about a Haskell function in Coq, Mona has to translate the function into Coq code. As Coq programs have to be total and Haskell programs are often not, Mona has to model partiality explicitly in Coq. In her quest for a solution Mona finds an ancient manuscript that explains how properties about Haskell functions can be proven in the proof assistant Agda by translating Haskell programs into monadic Agda programs. By instantiating the monadic program with a concrete monad instance the proof can be performed in either a total or a partial setting. Mona discovers that the proposed transformation does not work in Coq due to a restriction in the termination checker. In fact the transformation does not work in Agda anymore as well, as the termination checker in Agda has been improved. We follow Mona on an educational journey through the land of functional programming where she learns about concepts like free monads and containers as well as basics and restrictions of proof assistants like Coq. These concepts are well-known individually, but their interplay gives rise to a solution for Mona's problem based on the originally proposed monadic tranformation that has not been presented before. When Mona starts to test her approach by proving a statement about simple Haskell functions, she realizes that her approach has an additional advantage over the original idea in Agda. Mona's final solution not only works for a specific monad instance but even allows her to prove monad-generic properties. Instead of proving properties over and over again for specific monad instances she is able to prove properties that hold for all monads representable by a container-based instance of the free monad. In order to strengthen her confidence in the practicability of her approach, Mona evaluates her approach in a case study that compares two implementations for queues. In order to share the results with other functional programmers the fairy tale is available as a literate Coq file. If you are a citizen of the land of functional programming or are at least familiar with its customs, had a journey that involved reasoning about functional programs of your own, or are just a curious soul looking for the next story about monads and proofs, then this tale is for you.

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