Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/S028129/1
Title:	SCOPE: Scoped Contextual Operations and Effects.
Principal Investigator:	Wu, Dr N
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	Microsoft National University of Rosario (UNR) Tohoku University (Japan) University of Edinburgh University of Leuven
Department:	Computing
Organisation:	Imperial College London
Scheme:	New Investigator Award
Starts:	01 October 2019	Ends:	30 September 2021	Value (£):	262,413
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Fundamentals of Computing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:	Panel Date Panel Name Outcome 17 Jan 2019 EPSRC ICT Prioritisation Panel January 2019 Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
Language is undoubtedly the most formidable tool that humanity has ever wielded. While most spoken languages evolved organically through the common exchange of ideas and interactions of people, the best programming languages have been carefully crafted to communicate the solutions of problems with fluency and precision to computers. Humans understand that the interpretation of a sentence is affected by its surrounding context, and the extent of its influence determines its scope. The SCOPE project caims to translate and transfer these concepts to the field of programming languages, and enrich the range of tools at the disposal of the next generation of language designers. In the realm of software engineering, the most critical task is to predict and control the effects that an application will perform. Effects have proven difficult to master: their interactions are often complex and chaotic with unpredictable interference. To maintain control, software engineers often employ domain-specific languages (DSLs) that consist of operations which can be composed and interpreted to produce desired effects within a particular domain. An application developed as a block of monolithic code is soon impossible to manage and understand effectively. Instead, engineers work with smaller languages and libraries that deal with their own specialised tasks. As such, DSLs are ubiquitous in software engineering. They manifest themselves in every programming context ranging from small libraries and frameworks to programming languages in their own right. However, as requirements and expectations have become increasingly diverse, modern applications and their DSLs must be given multiple interpretations. For instance, they must be analysed to understand energy requirements, vulnerability to side-channel attacks, efficiency in space and time, and interaction with resources. Adding a new interpretation normally incurs a tremendous engineering effort, either requiring considerable refactoring to calculate and record more information, or the design of new compilers and program analysis tools. This is clearly a costly and tedious exercise that can quickly become overwhelming. This problem is exacerbated by the presence of multiple interacting languages, where each one requires its own tools and interpretations. There is therefore a pressing need for new programming language techniques that support the developers who must face these difficult challenges. An exciting development in programming language research that offers help has been the innovation of algebraic effect handlers, a technique that allows programmers to describe and manipulate the interaction of language features in a modular and sophisticated manner. The main insight of the technique is to focus on a clean separation between the syntax and the semantics of a language and to give the semantics in a structured approach. When operations and their effects are separated, it is easy to give different interpretations of code. The modularity and conceptual simplicity of the methodology has attracted much academic and industrial interest and has quickly spread to encompass implementations in many different languages and for a variety of purposes. Unfortunately, not all useful operations are algebraic, and even some of the most fundamental programming language constructs fall outside of what can be handled by the approach. Yet there is hope: the goal of the SCOPE project is to broaden the effect handlers technique to embrace operations that are sensitive to scope and context, thus covering a wide range of useful constructs. Extending our understanding of algebraic effects in this way would not only be important for the significant theoretical insight that will be provided, but also for the practical benefits of helping software engineers to use algebraic effect handlers to design and manipulate DSLs.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Impacts
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Organisation Website:	http://www.imperial.ac.uk