511 Multi-stage Programming (MWF 10:00AM - 10:50AM, 4 Credits)

Instructor:  Walid Taha

As the commercial production of software systems moves toward being a
traditional industry, automation will necessarily play a more
substantial role in this industry, just as it plays a key role in the
production of traditional commodities such as garments, automobiles,
chemicals, and electronics.  Today, there is wide interest (both in
industry and in academia) in automated software generation.

This course introduces multi-stage programming, an enabling technology
for effective yet highly reliable program generation systems.  In
addition to providing the usual constructs of a general-purpose
language, multi-stage languages internalize the notions of runtime
program generation and execution. This provides the programmer with
the essence of state of the art program generation methods, such as
partial evaluation and program specialization, both of which have been
shown to lead to dramatic resource-utilization gains in many
applications.  Such applications range from implementations of
domain-specific (or "little") languages to high-performance operating
systems.  Multi-stage languages make it possible to write generic and
highly-parameterized programs that do not pay unnecessary runtime
overheads.

The course will include an overview of the applications of these
languages, their theoretical foundations, and implementation issues.
We will begin with a survey of various examples of successful
automatic program generation techniques, and then move to a more
in-depth treatment of multi-stage languages.  The main implementation
of a multi-stage language that we will use will be MetaOCaml, but
students are also encouraged to explore other systems, such as 'C and
Tempo.  Course work will involve weekly assignments, a term project, a
midterm, and a final exam.

Additional information:

A preliminary version of the course web-page can be found at:

	http://www.cs.rice.edu/~taha/teaching/02F/511/

Undergraduate and graduate students interested in research projects on
this topic are particularly encouraged to audit this course.