MDCC TechTalk - Fun with type functions

by Simon Peyton Jones, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research

Today's most widely used technology, by far, for static program verification is the ubiquitous type checker. Alas, static type systems inevitably exclude some good programs; and allow some bad ones.  Thus motivated, Simon describes some fun he has been having with Haskell, by making the type system more expressive without losing the benefits of automatic proof and compact expression.

About Simon Peyton Jones

Simon Peyton Jones, MA, MBCS, CEng, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London, and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before moving to Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998.

His main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He has led a succession of research projects focused around the design and implementation of production-quality functional-language systems for both uniprocessors and parallel machines. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.

More generally, he is interested in language design, rich type systems, software component architectures, compiler technology, code generation, runtime systems, virtual machines, and garbage collection. He is particularly motivated by direct use of principled theory to practical language design and implementation -- that's one reason he loves functional programming so much. His home page is at

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj