David J. Pearce (Blog)

Testing out my Papilio FPGA!

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

Recently, I got hold of a Papilio One (which you can think of as the Arduino of FPGAs). The Papilio board has a Xilinx Spartan 3 on board, which is plenty enough to get started learning about FPGAs.

Building an Arduino Robot (for Testing Whiley)

Wednesday, December 12th, 2012

The Whiley programming language is about developing more reliable software and, of course, embedded systems is one of the biggest areas that could benefit. Obviously, then, we need an “embedded system” to test Whiley with, right?

A Source File with 72KLOC!?

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

Yesterday, I was looking at the stats on Ohloh for the Whiley project and noticed that my total line count for the project had increased from around 65KLOCto 143KLOC over a very short amount of time:

Generating Verification Conditions for Whiley

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

Probably the most interesting aspect of the Whiley language is that it supports compile-time verification of preconditions, postconditions and other invariants. There are two main aspects of how this works:

Comparing I/O in C with Java

Wednesday, November 28th, 2012

Recently, I was having a somewhat heated discussion with a friend about the Java I/O library (specificially java.io.*). His position was that the library is unnecessarily cluttered and verbose, and that I/O in C is much simpler and more productive.

Rustan on Automatic Program Verification

Tuesday, November 6th, 2012

Yesterday I came across an interesting talk given by Rustan Leino at the University of Edinburgh in 2011. Rustan takes an interesting look overview over the subject’s history, and then shows several tools in action (including Code Contracts and Dafny):

Formalising Flow Typing with Union, Intersection and Negation Types

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

The Whiley language takes an unusual approaching to static typing called flow typing. This helps to give Whiley the look-and-feel of a dynamically typed language. The key idea behind flow typing is to allow variables to have different types at different points in a program.

Profiling Field Initialisation in Java

Sunday, September 30th, 2012

Recently, I attended the annual Conference on Runtime Verification (RV2012) and gave a talk entitled “Profiling Field Initialisation in Java” (the paper itself is here). This is the work of my PhD student, Stephen Nelson, and he should take all the credit for the gory details.

A Misconception of Functional Programming?

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

Recently, I came across an article entitled “Useful Pure Functional Programming” which talks about the advantages of functional programming. However, something struck me about the way the author thinks about functional programming:

Autonomous Robotic Drone which Flies Indoors!?

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

Very recently, I came across this article from MIT News about an autonomous robotic drone developed at MIT. It’s incredibly neat stuff … and I would love to get Whiley running on something like this!

5
6
7
8
9