I recently talked about precision in a lab meeting, where I connected it to Helical semantics. This post summarizes some of the background and observations that informed that chalk talk.
There are three uses of precision that I focused (and will focus on in this post):
It's been almost a year since I started on my Helical rewrite in Rust (with a sizable dose of help and motivation from John!). I wrote the prototype in Python and while Gwen has been a good sport about alerting me to usability issues, the truth is that updating the core code is getting unruly. I've also been re-doing some of the program analysis stuff so that it's cleaner, less ad hoc, and generally more amenable to an interesting paper about the program semantics. However, I've let myself get distracted over the past year on other things, so I'm going to try to be more disciplined about getting the Rust rewrite done. In services of that I've decide to blog my way through the process, since like a lot of people I haaaaaaaate context switching and having to pick up where I left off.
ExPL, the experiment specification language of Helical, relies on user-provided annotations to infer an implicit post-interventional causal structure and query set. Annotations are attached to ExPL expressions and provide a link to the program variables in HyPL. Because ExPL encodes stateful executions, we need to be able to reason about the scope over which stateful operations apply. In this two-part blog post we'll talk about some challenges associated with using these annotations.
Just over a decade again POPL ran its first artifact evaluation and I was on it! I'm listed in the proceedings as "Emma F. Tosch" as an inside joke with Arjun, who ran the committee. I have what only I think is a Very Interesting Tale of reviewing, but that's not what this post is about. Instead, this post is about tracking down those old artifacts with just a pinch of oral history.
About three weeks ago I went down the shore to attended my maternal grandmother's burial. She was my last living grandparent and died in fall 2020.