Logarithm and Program Testing
- LecturerProf. Kuen-Bang Hou (Favonia) (University of Minnesota)
Host: Shin-Cheng Mu - Time2023-07-13 (Thu.) 10:00 ~ 13:00
- LocationAuditorium106 at IIS new Building
Abstract
Parametric polymorphism allows the same program to work with data of different types, significantly reducing code duplication. What is less known is that polymorphism also makes testing easier. The intuition is that fewer programs are polymorphic, and thus less testing is needed to distinguish them. One central question is how to choose a concrete type to instantiate these polymorphic programs for testing, and our POPL paper suggests that one should choose the "logarithm" of its input type to instantiate functions! This talk will explain why logarithm works and discuss further improvements. (This is joint work with my student Zhuyang Wang, and it was published in POPL 2022.)