PhD Program

Three years ago I started working on my PhD project, under FCT's grant SFRH/BD/19186/2004.
I've been working under the supervision of João Saraiva (University if Minho) and Oege de Moor (University of Oxford).
With this PhD project, named "Embedded Attribute Grammars", we propose to develop techniques and tools for the embedding of Attribute Grammars in a modern, lazy functional language. In particular, we want to study techniques to embed recent developments in AGs, namely, aspects (aspect-oriented programming), references (imperative programming), multiple inheritance (object oriented programming), strategies (strategic programming) and incremental attribute evaluation (incremental computation).
Yet, Attribute Grammars are also suitable to expresse incremental algorithms. Indeed, there are well known techniques to automatically derive incremental, strict attribute evaluators from an attribute grammar. The techniques developed until now, however, do not consider lazy evaluation. We want to study techniques to merge lazy and incremental evaluation.

This PhD research project is to be carried out in the Department of Informatics as Minho University and at Oxford Computing Laboratory, Oxford University.