MSPLS

On Saturday I went down to lovely Champaign-Urbana and gave my Earthlings and Martians talk at the annual meeting of the Midwest Society for Programming Languages and Systems (MSPLS). It was the second time I've given this particular talk to a reasonably-sized audience (or third, if you count the impromptu delivery I gave to the PL Lunch crowd on Friday) and I think it went about as well as before.

Well, as well as before but with one pretty important twist: the folks down at UIUC have been interested in using term rewriting to give semantics to programming languages, and they've been actively studying the potential there for a few years. They've grown a particular term-rewriting style out of the standard formal systems in use by the term-rewriting community that they argue is particularly good for giving semantics to programming languages; as we were watching each others' talks it struck both me and them that what they've got is very similar to Felleisen-Hieb-style context-sensitive reduction semantics. Since I go down to Champaign-Urbana all the time anyway, they suggested that I stop by the computer science department one day so we could get together and teach each other what we're doing.

So we're doing that next Monday. I'll give them a tutorial on context-sensitive reduction semantics and PLT Redex, and maybe they'll be able to teach me their particular brand of rewriting semantics and all the neat tools they've been developing there. Neat!