People
Faculty Members
Mitchell Wand |
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Professor Wand focuses on programming-language semantics and their application to compiler correctness.
In the early 1980s, he proposed the first compiler-correctness methodology both powerful enough to apply to realistic languages and simple enough to require only elementary mathematical techniques. A decade later, in perhaps the most detailed compiler-verification project ever completed, Professor Wand worked with MITRE Corporation to apply his techniques to the VLISP compiler. The result was a verified implementation of Scheme.
Throughout the 1990s, Professor Wand examined the verification of optimizing compilers. He sought to understand how a program analysis justifies the program transformation based upon it. He completed a number of case studies proving the correctness of analysis-based program transformations.
Professor Wand has also explored the related area of type theory, particularly as applied to object-oriented programming, and has been involved in program verification and category theory. With Daniel P. Friedman and Christopher T. Haynes, he wrote Essentials of Programming Languages, a widely used textbook now in its second edition.
A member of the College of Computer Science faculty since 1985, Professor Wand serves on the editorial boards of Information and Computation, Journal of Functional Programming, and Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation.
Career Publication Highlights
Wand, Mitchell. 1980. Continuation-based program transformation strategies. Journal of the ACM 27, 164-180, 1980.
Wand, Mitchell. 1983. Loops in combinator-based compilers. Information and Computation 57, no. 2-3:148-164.
Wand, Mitchell, Daniel P. Friedman, and Christopher T. Haynes. 2001. Essentials of programming languages, Second Edition. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Wand, Mitchell, Joshua Guttman, and John Ramsdell. 1995. VLISP: A verified implementation of Scheme. Lisp and Symbolic Computation 8, no. 1-2:5-32.
Wand, Mitchell. 2003. Understanding Aspects (Extended Abstract). Invited talk, International Conference on Functional Programming