To Scrap, or Not to Scrap?

Unwillingly to the Scrap Heap

A B.M.S.A. Scrap-Book

Session 1948-49 I.T is customary on the occasion of his inauguration for your President to give you an address, and a wide variety of subjects has been chosen in previous years. Sometimes the speaker discussed some facets of his professional work, and at other times the address reflected his interest in matters not strictly medical, as in last year's memorable dissertation. It was chance which ...

E-scrap: An Opportunity

The success of the electronics industry over the last decade in developing the mass consumer market for computers, cellphones and other personal electronic equipment has been phenomenal. Society must now finds ways of safely and economically recovering the materials that are embedded in these products. This will require significant investment by governments, industry and individuals, in technol...

“Scrap Your Boilerplate” Explained

The paper “Scrap your Boilerplate” (SYB) introduces a combinator library for generic programming that offers generic traversals and queries. Classically, support for generic programming consists of two essential ingredients: a way to write type-indexed functions, and independently, a way to access the structure of data types. SYB seems to lack the second. As a consequence, it is difficult to co...

"Scrap Your Boilerplate" Revolutions

Generic programming allows you to write a function once, and use it many times at different types. Traditionally, generic functions are defined by induction on the structure of types. “Scrap your boilerplate” (SYB) is a radically different approach that dispatches on the structure of values. In previous work, we have shown how to reconcile both approaches using the concept of generic views: man...