Recent years have seen increased use of scripting languages
in large applications. Scripting languages optimize
development time, especially early in the software life
cycle, over safety and robustness. As the understanding of
the system reaches a critical point and requirements
stabilize, scripting languages become less
appealing. Compromises made to optimize development time
make it harder to reason about program correctness, harder
to do semantic-preserving refactorings, and harder to
optimize execution speed. Lack of type information makes
code harder to navigate and to use correctly. In the worst
cases, this situation leads to a costly and potentially
error-prone rewrite of a program in a compiled language,
losing the flexibility of scripting languages for future
extension.
Recently, pluggable type systems and annotation systems have
been proposed. Such systems add compile-time checkable
annotations without changing a program’s run-time semantics
which facilitates early error checking and program
analysis. It is believed that untyped scripts can be
retrofitted to work with such systems. Furthermore,
integration of typed and untyped code, for example, through
use of gradual typing, allows scripts to evolve into safer
programs more suitable for program analysis and compile-time
optimizations.
With few exceptions, practical reports are yet to be
found. The STOP workshop focuses on the evolution of
scripts, largely untyped code, into safer programs, with
more rigid structure and more constrained behavior through
the use of gradual/hybrid/pluggable typing, optional
contract checking, extensible languages, refactoring tools,
and the like. The goal is to further the understanding and
use of such systems in practice, and connect practice and
theory.
Call for Contributions
Abstracts, position papers, and status reports are
welcome. Papers should be 1--2 pages in standard ACM SIGPLAN
format. All submissions will be reviewed by the program
committee. The accepted papers, after rework by the authors,
will be published in an informal proceedings, which will be
distributed at the workshop. All accepted submissions shall
remain available from the workshop web page.
Papers are to be submitted electronically via the STOP submission
site:
http://continue2.cs.brown.edu/stop2012/