NEWS

Satoshi Egi of Rakuten Institute of Technology attended the 20th annual Scheme and Functional Programming Workshop in Berlin, Germany to present his research paper.  Mr. Egi is part of the Advanced Software Team of RIT’s Power Domain Group where he works on the programming language he created, known as Egison. On August 18, he presented “Scheme Macros for Non-linear Pattern Matching with Backtracking for Non-free Data Types” to a crowd of programming language practitioners. He discussed the implementation of a scheme macro methodology to execute Egison pattern matching (a mechanism for checking a value against a pattern and an important feature for data abstraction) at high speed performance.

Mr. Egi’s paper proposes a method that translates a program containing pattern-matching expressions of the Egison programming language to a program that contains only existing syntax constructs of functional programing languages. As his abstract lays out, this is based on three ideas: (i) transformation of a matcher to a function that takes a pattern and a target; (ii) compilation of match-all to application of the map function; (iii) transformation of a value pattern to a function that takes an intermediate pattern-matching result and returns a value.

Dr. Simon Peyton Jones, a pioneer in the field of functional programming languages and key contributor to the design of Haskell, was one of the scientists in attendance. During the Q&A session, he addressed his concerns on the trade-offs of an increase of expressive power of programming languages and complication of programming languages.

We want to thank the organizers for putting together the workshop as well as all the students and practitioners in attendance.