We propose a new extension to the purely functional programming language Haskell that supports compile-time meta-programming. The purpose of the system is to support the algorithmic construction of programs at compile-time. The ability to generate code at compile time allows the programmer to implement such features as polytypic programs, macro-like expansion, user directed optimization (such as inlining), and the generation of supporting data structures and functions from existing data structures and functions. Our design is being implemented in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, ghc. 1

introduc e a notion of guarded rec ursive (g.r.) datatype c#w struc tors, generalizing the notion ofrec# rsive datatypes in func tional programming languages suc h as ML and Haskell. We address both theoret ic#t and prac# ic## issues resulted from this generalization. On one hand, we design a type system to formalize the notion of g.r. datatypec onstruc - tors and then prove the soundness of the type system. On the other hand, we present some signific ant applic ations (e.g., implementing objec ts, implementing stagedc omputation, etc# ) of g.r. datatype c# nstruc#S rs, arguing that g.r. datatypec onstruc torsc an have far-reac hingc onsequenc es in programming. The mainc ontribution of the paper lies in the rec#I0 ition and then the formalization of a programming notion that is of both theoretic# l interest and prac tic# l use.

Web applications typically interact with a back-end database to retrieve persistent data and then present the data to the user as dynamically generated output, such as HTML web pages. However, this interaction is commonly done through a low-level API by dynamically constructing query strings within a general-purpose programming language, such as Java. This low-level interaction is ad hoc because it does not take into account the structure of the output language. Accordingly, user inputs are treated as isolated lexical entities which, if not properly sanitized, can cause the web application to generate unintended output. This is called a command injection attack, which poses a serious threat to web application security. This paper presents the first formal definition of command injection attacks in the context of web applications, and gives a sound and complete algorithm for preventing them based on context-free grammars and compiler parsing techniques. Our key observation is that, for an attack to succeed, the input that gets propagated into the database query or the output document must change the intended syntactic structure of the query or document. Our definition and algorithm are general and apply to many forms of command injection attacks. We validate our approach with SQLCHECK, an implementation for the setting of SQL command injection attacks. We evaluated SQLCHECK on real-world web applications with systematically compiled real-world attack data as input. SQLCHECK produced no false positives or false negatives, incurred low runtime overhead, and applied straightforwardly to web applications written in different languages.

The Jakarta Tool Suite (JTS) aims to reduce substantially the cost of generator development by providing domainindependent tools for creating domain-specific languages and component-based generators called GenVoca generators. JTS is a set of precompiler-compiler tools for extending industrial programming languages (e.g., Java) with domain-specific constructs. JTS is itself a GenVoca generator, where precompilers for JTS-extended languages are constructed from components.

MetaML is a statically typed functional programming language with special support for program generation. In addition to providing the standard features of contemporary programming languages such as Standard ML, MetaML provides three staging annotations. These staging annotations allow the construction, combination, and execution of object-programs. Our thesis is that MetaML's three staging annotations provide a useful, theoretically sound basis for building program generators. This dissertation reports on our study of MetaML's staging constructs, their use, their implementation, and their formal semantics. Our results include an extended example of where MetaML allows us to produce efficient programs, an explanation of why implementing these constructs in traditional ways can be challenging, two formulations of MetaML's semantics, a type system for MetaML, and a proposal for extending ...

The recent years have seen a number of proposals for extending statically typed languages by dynamics or generics. Most proposals --- if not all --- require significant extensions to the underlying language. In this paper we show that this need not be the case. We propose a particularly lightweight extension that supports both dynamics and generics. Furthermore, the two features are smoothly integrated: dynamic values, for instance, can be passed to generic functions. Our proposal makes do with a standard Hindley-Milner type system augmented by existential types. Building upon these ideas we have implemented a small library that is readily usable both with Hugs and with the Glasgow Haskell compiler.

Many data-intensive applications dynamically construct queries in response to client requests and execute them. Java servlets, e.g., can create string representations of SQL queries and then send the queries, using JDBC, to a database server for execution. The servlet programmer enjoys static checking via Java's strong type system. However, the Java type system does little to check for possible errors in the dynamically generated SQL query strings. Thus, a type error in a generated selection query (e.g., comparing a string attribute with an integer) can result in an SQL runtime exception. Currently, such defects must be rooted out through careful testing, or (worse) might be found by customers at runtime. In this paper, we present a sound, static, program analysis technique to verify the correctness of dynamically generated query strings. We describe our analysis technique and provide soundness results for our static analysis algorithm. We also describe the details of a prototype tool based on the algorithm and present several illustrative defects found in senior software-engineering student-team projects, online tutorial examples, and a realworld purchase order system written by one of the authors.

This paper explores a new point in the design space of formal reasoning systems - part programming language, part logical framework. The system is built on a programming language where the user expresses equality constraints between types and the type checker then enforces these constraints. This simple extension to the type system allows the programmer to describe properties of his program in the types of witness objects which can be thought of as concrete evidence that the program has the property desired. These techniques and two other rich typing mechanisms, rank-N polymorphism and extensible kinds, create a powerful new programming idiom for writing programs whose types enforce semantic properties. A language with these features is both a practical programming language and a logic. This marriage between two previously separate entities increases the probability that users will apply formal methods to their programming designs. This kind of synthesis creates the foundations for the languages of the future.

“I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”

The ability to extend a language with new syntactic forms is a powerful tool. A sufficiently flexible macro system allows programmers to build from a common base towards a language designed specifically for their problem domain. However, macro facilities that are integrated, capable, and at the same time simple enough to be widely used have been limited to the Lisp family of languages to date. In this paper we introduce a macro facility, called the Java Syntactic Extender (JSE), with the superior power and ease of use of Lisp macro systems, but for Java, a language with a more conventional algebraic syntax. The design is based on the Dylan macro system, but exploits Java’s compilation model to offer a full procedural macro engine. In other words, syntax expanders may be implemented in, and so use all the facilities of, the full Java language. 1.