Section: Overall Objectives

Qualities of a programming language

A programming language is the medium through which an intent (software design) is expressed (program development), acted upon (program execution), and reasoned about (verification). It would be a mistake to argue that, with sufficient dedication, effort, time and cleverness, good software can be written in any programming language. Although this may be true in principle, in reality, the choice of an adequate programming language can be the deciding factor between software that works and software that does not, or even cannot be developed at all.

We believe, in particular, that it is crucial for a programming language to be safe, expressive, to encourage modularity, and to have a simple, well-defined semantics.

• Safety. The execution of a program must not ever be allowed to go wrong in an unpredictable way. Examples of behaviors that must be forbidden include reading or writing data outside of the memory area assigned by the operating system to the process and executing arbitrary data as if it were code. A programming language is safe if every safety violation is gracefully detected either at compile time or at runtime.

• Expressiveness. The programming language should allow programmers to think in terms of concise, high-level abstractions—including the concepts and entities of the application domain—as opposed to verbose, low-level representations or encodings of these concepts.

• Modularity. The programming language should make it easy to develop a software component in isolation, to describe how it is intended to be composed with other components, and to check at composition time that this intent is respected.

• Semantics. The programming language should come with a mathematical definition of the meaning of programs, as opposed to an informal, natural-language description. This definition should ideally be formal, that is, amenable to processing by a machine. A well-defined semantics is a prerequisite for proving that the language is safe (in the above sense) and for proving that a specific program is correct (via model-checking, deductive program verification, or other formal methods).

The safety of a programming language is usually achieved via a combination of design decisions, compile-time type-checking, and runtime checking. As an example design decision, memory deallocation, a dangerous operation, can be placed outside of the programmer's control. As an example of compile-time type-checking, attempting to use an integer as if it were a pointer can be considered a type error; a program that attempts to do this is then rejected by the compiler before it is executed. Finally, as an example of runtime checking, attempting to access an array outside of its bounds can be considered a runtime error: if a program attempts to do this, then its execution is aborted.

Type-checking can be viewed as an automated means of establishing certain correctness properties of programs. Thus, type-checking is a form of “lightweight formal methods” that provides weak guarantees but whose burden seems acceptable to most programmers. However, type-checking is more than just a program analysis that detects a class of programming errors at compile time. Indeed, types offer a language in which the interaction between one program component and the rest of the program can be formally described. Thus, they can be used to express a high-level description of the service provided by this component (i.e., its API), independently of its implementation. At the same time, they protect this component against misuse by other components. In short, “type structure is a syntactic discipline for enforcing levels of abstraction”. In other words, types offer basic support for expressiveness and modularity, as described above.

For this reason, types play a central role in programming language design. They have been and remain a fundamental research topic in our group. More generally, the design of new programming languages and new type systems and the proof of their safety has been and remains an important theme. The continued evolution of OCaml, as well as the design and formalization of Mezzo [2], are examples.