Generic programming centers around the idea of abstracting from concrete, efficient algorithms to obtain generic algorithms that can be combined with different data representations to produce a wide variety of useful software. For example, a class of generic sorting algorithms can be defined which work with finite sequences but which can be instantiated in different ways to produce algorithms working on arrays or linked lists. Four kinds of abstraction---data, algorithmic, structural, and representational--- are discussed, with examples of their use in building an Ada library of software components. The main topic discussed is generic algorithms and an approach to their formal specification and verification, with illustration in terms of a partitioning algorithm such as is used in the quicksort algorithm. It is argued that generically programmed software component libraries offer important advantages for achieving software productivity and reliability. This paper was presented at the...

First and foremost I thank my parents for all their love and for teaching me to enjoy learning. I especially thank my wife Katie for her support and understanding through this long and sometimes stressful process. I also thank Katie for insisting on good error messages for G! My advisor, Andrew Lumsdaine, deserves many thanks for his support and guidance and for keeping the faith as I undertook this long journey away from scientific computing and into the field of programming languages. I thank my thesis committee: R. Kent Dybvig, Daniel P. Friedman, Steven D. Johnson, and Amr Sabry for their advice and encouragement. A special thanks goes to Ronald Garcia, Christopher Mueller, and Douglas Gregor for carefully editing and catching the many many times when I accidentally skipped over the important stuff. Thanks to Jaakko and Jeremiah for hours of stimulating discussions and arguments concerning separate compilation and concept-based overloading. Thanks to David Abrahams for countless hours spent debating the merits of one design over another while jogging through the hinterlands of Norway. Thanks to Alexander Stepanov and David Musser for getting all this started, and thank you for the encouragement over the years. Thanks to Matthew Austern, his book Generic Programming in the STL was both an inspiration

Generic programming is an especially attractive paradigm for developing libraries for high-performance computing because it simultaneously emphasizes generality and efficiency. In the generic programming approach, interfaces are based on sets of specified requirements on types, rather than on any particular types, allowing algorithms to inter-operate with any data types meeting the necessary requirements. These sets of requirements, known as concepts, can specify syntactic as well as semantic requirements. Besides providing a powerful means of describing interfaces to maximize software reuse, concepts provide a uniform mechanism for more closely coupling libraries with compilers and for effecting domain-specific library-based compiler extensions. To realize this goal however, programming languages and their associated tools must support concepts as first-class constructs. In this paper we advocate better syntactic and semantic support to make concepts first-class and present results demonstrating the kinds of improvements that are possible with static checking, compiler optimization, and algorithm correctness proofs for generic libraries based on concepts.

This paper explores how certain ideas in object oriented languages have their correspondents in functional languages. In particular we look at the analogue of the iterators of the C++ standard template library. We also give an example of the use of constructor classes which feature in Haskell 1.3 and Gofer. 1 Introduction The combination of higher order and polymorphic functions in modern programming languages --- chiefly in functional languages, but increasingly in object-oriented languages as well --- makes them most suitable for software reuse. Polymorphism allows operations to be applied over whole classes of types, whilst function parameters mean that particular operations can be abstracted away, to be passed in as values on application. the first part of the paper provides a tutorial on this, in the Miranda 1 functional programming language. Beyond this `algorithmic' abstraction, there lies data abstraction: access to a particular type can be given (solely) through a signature...

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C++0x is the working title for the revision of the ISO standard of the C++ programming language that was originally planned for release in 2009 (but that will probably appear in 2011). The largest language extension in C++0x was “concepts”, that is, a collection of features for constraining template parameters. In September of 2008, the C++ standards committee voted the concepts extension into C++0x, but then in July of 2009, the committee voted the concepts extension back out of C++0x. This article is my account of the technical challenges and debates within the “concepts” effort in the years 2003 to 2009.