CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.

High-level views on low-level representations Export

In ICFP '05: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming (2005), pp. 168-179.

Citation Format

[Posts]

View FullText article


X Reviews [Write a review of this article]

X Find related articles from these CiteULike users

X Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

X Posting History

X Abstract

This paper explains how the high-level treatment of datatypes in functional languages---using features like constructor functions and pattern matching---can be made to coexist with bitdata. We use this term to describe the bit-level representations of data that are required in the construction of many different applications, including operating systems, device drivers, and assemblers. We explain our approach as a combination of two language extensions, each of which could potentially be adapted to any modern functional language. The first adds simple and elegant constructs for manipulating raw bitfield values, while the second provides a view-like mechanism for defining distinct new bitdata types with fine-control over the underlying representation. Our design leverages polymorphic type inference, as well as techniques for improvement of qualified types, to track both the type and the width of bitdata structures. We have implemented our extensions in a small functional language interpreter, and used it to show that our approach can handle a wide range of practical bitdata types.


X BibTeX record

X RIS record


Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.