ITA Software's Technical Seminar Series

Talk Topic: Father Time: A Dataflow Extension of DrScheme
Greg Copper, ITA Software
February 6, 2008

Abstract

Dataflow programming extends functional programming with a notion of signals: time-varying values that are automatically kept consistent by the language. Signals provide a simple, declarative mechanism for expressing reactive programs without callbacks or explicit side-effects. In this talk I will present FrTime, an extension of PLT Scheme with dataflow evaluation. The language's distinguishing features include:

• an event-driven evaluation model
• transparent reuse of Scheme code
• support for reactive data structures
• integration with the DrScheme programming environment

The talk will focus on various design questions that arose during the language's development. If I have time I will also talk about practical concerns such as runtime performance, applications, and ports of the implementation strategy to other programming languages.

Bio

Greg joined ITA as a DCS hacker in July 2007. The work described in this talk was done while he was a graduate student at Brown University.