School of Computing Research Colloquia

What is the Future of DataTypes

Professor Neil Ghani, Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde

In this talk I'll describe my take on our past, current and future understanding of datatypes. I will begin with a discussion of simple data types such as natural numbers and lists and ask how we can automatically provide the computational infrastructure required to program effectively with such types. Doing so, of course, requires a clear, concise and conceptually simple theory of data types. I will describe that theory and then show its predictive power can be used to derive the analogous computational infrastructure required to compute with todays and tomorrows (and the day afters) data types.