Doctoral seminars

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Wednesday, December 12, 11:00-12:00 in Celestijnenlaan 200A Aud 200 L07, 3001 Leuven-Heverlee

The Scala Experience -- Programming with Functional Objects

By Martin Odersky (Lausanne, Switzerland)

Abstract:

Scala is a general purpose programming language which is fully inter-operable with Java. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. Scala allows a terseness of style comparable to scripting languages but has at the same time a strong and static type system. In this way, it can express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way.

This talk will give an introduction to the Scala programming language, highlighting its main innovative features: closures, pattern matching, type abstraction, and mixins. We will show how these features together enable the construction of truely high-level libraries that provide in effect embedded domain-specific languages.

Bio:
Martin Odersky is a professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He's interested in object-oriented and functional programming. His research thesis is that the two paradigms are two sides of the same coin, to be identified as much as possible. To prove this, he has worked with a number of language designs in the past, in particular the Pizza and GJ extensions to Java. He has also influenced the development of Java as a co-designer of Java generics and as the original author of the current javac reference compiler. His recent work is centered on Scala, a new programming language which unifies FP and OOP while staying completely inter-operable with Java.