In this talk, I’ll give a crash course in reading and understanding the dense notational conventions often employed in programming language research papers and try to motivate why these conventions are used in the first place. We’ll cover different forms of operational semantics such as big-step and small-step semantics, the relation between SOS-style and evaluation-style presentations, and notions such as environments, substitution, abstract machines, and type systems. This talk will by no means provide complete coverage of these topics, but should give you just enough to get a sense of what is going on in any given ICFP paper you happen to pick up.

David Van Horn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests are in programming languages and formal methods, where he works toward making the construction of reusable, trusted software components possible and effective. He publishes regularly in the flagship SIGPLAN conferences, POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA, and ICFP, and his work has been recognized with a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship, a Communications of the ACM Research Highlight, an OOPSLA Distinguished Paper Award, and several invitations to special issues of the Journal of Functional Programming devoted to ICFP. He is the co-author of “Realm of Racket,” an illustrated book on programming video games, written and illustrated with eight undergraduate students. He is devoted to broadening participation in computer science and is currently serving as Chair of the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop @ ICFP.