Tuesday October 16 is an excellent day for a lot of truly excellent reasons. The one of concern here is that it was chosen to be the Ada Lovelace Day, whose purpose is to celebrate important women in one's scientific field.

(A recent ESOP submission has left me enthusiastic about exotic time zones. I'm aiming to publish this article on Octobre 16 before 23:59 GMT-11, which might look like the following day to some readers, including those living in Samoa as it changed timezone in December 2011. Oh well.)

As far as I have witnessed, the Gallium-related fields in computer science research (programming languages design, compilation, type systems...) share the bane of most other computer science domains (or software development communities) in having a very low ratio of women at all levels.

Despite this imbalance, we actually have quite a few women that made very important advances. In the process of writing this billet, I gathered a rather long list of names of persons I would like to write about. Those are mostly researchers from the second half of the 20th century, but not only: Emmy Noether was suggested to me by Xavier, as the well-founded induction techniques she developed are quite useful when writing formal devlopments in a proof assistant such as Coq -- and of course her leading role in the movement of formalization of mathematics through abstract algebra had wide-ranging consequences that can definitely be felt, indirectly, in the development of programming languages and systems.

I have finally decided to avoid enumerations and rather attempt to write something interesting on just a few women. This also has the advantage of leaving ample material for the next years, even if they will be new names to add to the list by then.

Barbara Liskov

The works of Barbara Liskov that had the most influence on me, personally, where abstract data types (not to be confused with algebraic data types) and the Liskov Substituability Principle (LSP).

Abstract data types

The idea of abstract data types and encapsulation seems so natural now that it is difficult to imagine that is wasn't around before the beginning of the seventies. A lot of people were doing similar things at that time, but Barbara Liskov proposed a lucid notion of abstract datatypes, whose internal implementation choices were hidden from outside user modules. She then integrated it in 1974 into a new language design, CLU, which proved very influential for many other aspects as well: garbage collected, iterators, multiple value return, exception handling... If you want to learn more about the genesis of abstract types and CLU at large, you should read A History of CLU (PDF,31 pages) that she wrote later in 1992.

Abstract types were named "clusters", and this is where the CLU name comes from. Let's show the Wikipedia example:

complex_number = cluster is add, subtract, multiply rep = record [ real_part: real, imag_part: real ] add = proc ... end add; subtract = proc ... end subtract; multiply = proc ... end multiply; end complex_number;

This cluster exports the type complex_number along with operations add , substract and multiply . This is all the user of the cluster ever sees. Internally, the type is given a representation (a type definition rep = ... ) and the operations are implemented in terms of this representation, but this is encapsulated and doesn't leak to the outside.

Barbara Liskov has also played an influential in the development of object-oriented techniques (and languages for distributed computing), but CLU was not object-oriented. Some aspects of the design were influenced by Simula (1967), but the "History of CLU" paper gives a careful and detailed explanation of the difference between the "abstract data-type" and the "object-oriented" (in the spirit of Simula and Smalltalk) design style, that would be later expanded upon and constrasted -- see William Cook's On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited.

Abstract types are a very important concept in ML programming languages. In 1988, Plotkin and Mitchell proposed to understand such type abstraction as use of existential types (Abstract Typess have Existential Type), but the ML module systems actually takes a relatively different approach to type abstraction. Several authors have tried to bridge the gap, including in particular our very own Benoît Montagu in his 2009 article with Didier Rémy, Modeling Abstract Types in Modules with Open Existential Types.

Liskov Substituability Principle

The Liskov Substituability Principle (LSP) stems from a 1994 paper that Barbara Liskov wrote with Jeannette Wing, A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping. It gives the right definition of what subtyping means: a type S is a subtype of a type T if all values of type S behave like values of type T . From this vision you can derive most properties of subtyping relations (in particular contravariance in input parameters), but those were already well-understood in 1994; Liskov and Wing made the notion of "behave like" formal, by saying that anything that could be proved about values of type T should also be provable on values of type S .

The rest of the paper is interesting (they provide limited extension techniques that guarantee that this strong semantics requirement is met), but what made history was how this principle got a name, LSP, and was widely diffused to practitioners of object-oriented programming. It is now part of all methodology advice on programming. Mainstream object-oriented languages went for richer notions of extension that those that are clearly correct, and systems mixing programs and proofs to statically ensure substituability are still at the research stage, but everyone shoud know by now that the derived types the programmers implement must respect the LSP -- it could be argued that the preferred extension method of object-oriented languages, implementation inheritance, makes it particularly easy to mistakenly violate this invariant, so talking about it loud is extremely useful.

Christine Paulin-Mohring

I had the luck to have Christine Paulin-Mohring as teacher at the MPRI (if you are looking for a research-oriented graduate curriculum in computer science, consider coming to Paris for the MPRI). Christine played an instrumental role in the development of the Coq proof assistant, including leading the development of it. Among the most apparent works of Christine are her work on program extraction out of Coq, and on inductive definitions.

If you already know a bit of Coq, you should consider reading the Credits page of the Coq documentation, that is essentially a changelog of important Coq version since Coq 5.10 in 1995 -- it really is surprisingly interesting. Christine Paulin-Mohring is directly cited in most of those release notes, and wrote several of them.

Program extraction allows to take a Coq file and output a program in a functional programming language such as OCaml, Haskell or Scheme. A Coq file actually is a mix of programs (or proofs) written in a style that resembles strongly typed functional programming language, and tactics that are evil little metaprogramming scripts that build proofs (or programs) and are composed interactively by the user, with direct feedback on the desired type of the terms to build and the available environment. The job of extraction is to take this happy mix and produce a Haskell, OCaml or Scheme program that can be compiled down to something efficient -- in particular, it strives to remove unnecessary computations that are not really needed during the program execution but corresponds to static correctness proof about the program.

In Coq, this separation between what's needed at runtime and what can be "erased" is done by a strict typing discipline: some types live in Prop , the universe of logical propositions (this mean that they themselves have type Prop ), and their values can always be erased, and the rest, outside Prop , is kept. Note that this does not depend on how the terms are written (programs or tactics); if you're adventurous, you may use tactics as a meta-programming tool to write honest programs executed at runtime, or write proofs by directly writing the corresponding proof terms as ML-like programs.

Prop has specific typing rules (it is called impredicative) designed to make it convenient to use for mathematical proofs, and the type-checking rules have been designed to allow extraction. In particular, if an inductive type in Prop has non-erasable parameters or at least two constructors, you may not pattern-match on it in an expression returning a non-erasable value. The following examples fails to type-check with a rather self-descriptive error:

Inductive Choice : Prop := A | B. Definition zero_or_one choice : nat := match choice with | A => 0 | B => 1 end.

Error:

Incorrect elimination of "choice" in the inductive type "Choice":

the return type has sort "Set" while it should be "Prop".

Elimination of an inductive object of sort Prop

is not allowed on a predicate in sort Set

because proofs can be eliminated only to build proofs.

Indeed, the parameter choice , having type Choice , will be erased during extraction. Yet the return type of zero_or_one is a concrete natural number; it is impossible to compute this result if the parameter choice is not passed at runtime. One can fix this by moving the type of Choice out of Prop , or the result type inside Prop . When writing certified programs these choices are usually rather simple to make, as it is clear from the whole program architecture which parts are "program" and which are "proofs about the program" : the program definition should not depend on its own correctness proof. Of course in some cases you would wish for a more flexible distinction, but that's for another discussion.

While this whole description is a bit fuzzy on the details and make some simplifications, I took care to point out that the limitation on pattern-matching of propositions to return runtime values held for inductive types of at least two constructors (or using non-erasable parameters). Indeed, if a type has only one constructor, of which all parameters are themselves erasable, matching on it does not actually influence the runtime execution of the program (it is called "non-informative") and may be used for its type-checking virtues. The reason I develop this example here is that it interleaves both topics of inductive definitions and program extraction.

The one-constructor case is extremely useful. That is how, for example, equalities between terms can be used to type-check a non-erasable program : they have only one constructor, reflexivity. This is also the key to the use of accessibility predicates (a constructive remnant of noetherian, or well-founded, induction) to write programs with subtle termination proof. Given a relation R on the type A , here is the type that claims that R is well-founded:

Inductive Acc (x: A) : Prop := Acc_intro : (forall y:A, R y x -> Acc y) -> Acc x.

When making a recursive call that has not obviously decreasing parameters, one may instead use such an accessibility predicate to show only that the recursive arguments are related (~ smaller than) the arguments of the current call. This allows the user to choose the termination argument (encoded in the relation R ) in a very general way.

The other major use of this rule is the case of the inductive type having no constructor at all. This is the proposition False , whose proposition can be asked to the Coq system (here using the coqtop interactive toplevel):

Coq < Print False.

Inductive False : Prop :=

That's it: False have no constructor. This means that when you have a term at type False (a proof of contradiction), you may say "I'm done, this case never happens" through an empty pattern matching: match contradiction with end. This pattern-matching works at any target type A (the outer function you're defining tries to produce an A ) as all cases of the match are well-typed at type A . And it works inside proofs, but also to build terms despite False being a proposition, as it has less than two constructors.

Christine Paulin-Mohring worked on all of this, and later taught it to me and numerous other students.