Special Feature

At PEPM'10, we will have a video talk premiering new movie processing technology that a team at the University of Kansas is developing based on applicative functors (from the Haskell zoo of abstractions). The content of their presentation promises to be interesting and entertaining as well:

• Andy Gill, Garrin Kimmell and Kevin Matlage. Capturing Functions and Catching Satellites.
  
  Abstract: The 2009 ICFP contest required the programming of virtual satellites that obey basic physical laws. The orbital physics of the system ran on top of a simple virtual machine which was customized via a binary provided to contestants. In our talk, we describe the modeling of our simulation environment, with a focus on the compilation and testing infrastructure for the generated binaries. This infrastructure makes novel use of a deeply embedded domain specific language on top of Haskell. In particular, with use of IO-based observable sharing, it is straightforward for a function to be both an executable specification as well as a portable implementation.