Programmable concurrency in a pure and lazy language
Peng Li · 2008
First, I thank my dissertation advisor, Steve Zdancewic, who has always been supportive to me in the last five years. Steve taught me how to do research, co-authored many papers with me, gave me insightful feedbacks and practically line-by-line writing advices, encouraged me to look for research directions that I am most interested in and obtained funding for my dissertation research. As an advisor, he could not have been more helpful. My other mentors on programming languages research also deserve my thanks. Benjamin Pierce enlightened me on functional programming and the theory of programming languages; Stephanie Weirich impressed me on what type systems can do; Simon Peyton Jones educated me on the principles and philosophies of language design; Simon Marlow showed me how far one can go to make things run faster. In particular, I thank Benjamin Pierce and Stephanie Weirich for serving in my thesis committee. I thank all the PL Club members for sharing their knowledge in the weekly discussions. I particularly thank Geoffery Washburn for helping me out with the CIS-670 project and patiently explaining programming language concepts to me when I first started doing research in programming languages. I should also give special thanks to Stephen Tse who has been a great friend to talk about information-flow type systems and functional programming.