mwang_pay (06/25/82)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
SYMBOLIC MANIPULATION SEMINAR - June 28, 1982
Barry Trager of Mathematical Sciences Department,
IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights
will speak on "A Language for Computational Algebra"
TIME: 11:00 AM
ROOM: MC5158
ABSTRACT
This talk reports ongoing research on the development of a
language with extensible parameterized types and generic
operators for computational algebra. The language provides
an abstract data type mechanism for defining algorithms
which work in as general a setting as possible. The
language is based on the notations of _d_o_m_a_i_n_s and
_c_a_t_e_g_o_r_i_e_s. Domains represent algebraic structures.
Categories designate collections of domains having common
operators with stated mathematical properties. Domains and
categories are computed objects which may be dynamically as-
signed to variables, passed as arguments, and returned by
functions. Although the language has been carefully
tailored for the application of algebraic computation, it
actually provides a very general abstract data type mechan-
ism. Our notion of a category to group domains with common
properties appears novel among programming languages (cf.
image functor of RUSSELL) and leads to a very powerful no-
tion of abstract algorithms missing from other work on data
types known to the authors.
June 24, 1982