Title: Program Entanglement, Feature Interaction and the Feature Language Extensions

Speaker: Wu-Hon F. Leung
   Computer Science Department, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA
   leung@iit.edu


Abstract:
Two problems are fundamental to the difficulty of developing large
scale high confidence software: first, software verification relies on
costly and unreliable testing; second, adding new features to the software
typically requires the programmers to go through a laborious and error prone
process of changing existing code. The Feature Language Extensions (FLX) is
a set of programming language constructs designed to overcome these two
problems. In this talk, we discuss its solution to the second problem.

We call the second problem the program entanglement problem because when
features are implemented by changing the code of other features, the
programs of these features entangle in the same reusable program unit of the
programming language, making them also difficult to be verified, maintained
and reused. With existing general purpose programming languages, this
problem is inevitable under very common conditions including for those
applications that require exception handling features.

In this talk, we will discuss the requirements that must be met to solve the
program entanglement problem, and the manner in which FLX meets these
requirements including a method to design and develop software. The
discussion will be illustrated by examples from applications that are
implemented using a research version of FLX to Java compiler. 


Bio: 
Dr Francis Leung is an IEEE Fellow cited for his contributions to
operating systems, protocols, and programming methods supporting the
development of distributed systems and multimedia communication
applications. He holds 14 patents in these areas including the original
patent on remote procedure calls. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science
from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr Leung has more than 20 years' experience in the telecommunications
industry and in large-scale software development. He managed many successful
research and development projects, at Motorola and Bell Laboratories, on
cellular infrastructure architecture, interactive video server, electronic
switching system software, multimedia communication protocols, ATM
technology and application oriented languages. As an example, his group
developed the switching software for the first field trial of packetized
voice in the public switched network; they were also the first to
demonstrate multimedia conferencing in a packet switching network. He is now
with the faculty of the computer science department of IIT.