Incremental, Interactive Type-checking for Lua

Researcher(s): Zahrah Alawami, Graduate Student, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan

Supervisor: Christopher Dutchyn, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

Purpose and Objectives of the Research

Incremental, interactive programming environments are growing in popularity because they are well-tailored to the complexity of software development process. However, those environments are not utilized for their maximum potential as they lack a type system, which would hasten error discovery, and enforce disciplined programming. To illustrate the proposed typing system, we chose Lua, one of the dynamically-typed, interactively-developed programming languages. Lua is a powerful, lightweight, flexible, embeddable scripting language. It has most of the constructs found in dynamically-typed languages that will inform type inference in interactive environments as well as some other unique constructs that will inform type inference in general. To explore the effectiveness of the type-inference system, we have integrated it into an integrated development environment (IDE), which we call ILuaType.

Responsibilities

Participated in the study and developed a Text Adventure Game using the provided IDE – ILuaType.