Proceedings Workshop on Generic Programming (WGP2000)

Abstract

This report contains the papers selected for presentation at the 2nd Workshop on Generic Programming (WGP2000), which was held on July 6, 2000 in Ponte de Lima, Portugal. Generic programming is about making programs more adaptable by making them more general. Generic programs often embody non-traditional kinds of polymorphism; ordinary programs are obtained from them by suitably instantiating their parameters. In contrast with normal programs, the parameters of a generic program are often quite rich in structure. For example they may be other programs, types or type constructors, kinds, or even programming paradigms. There are several different interpretations of the term 'generic programming', and what was called generic programming ten years ago, might be standard programming practice now. The papers presented at WGP2000 are mainly about the Bird-Meertens style of generic programming. The theory of datatypes developed in the groups around Bird and Meertens has led to generic (or polytypic) programs, theory about generic programs, and generic programming language extensions. Generic programming is also studied in the context of the C++ Standard Template Library and Adaptive Object-Oriented Programming, amongst others, but we received few submissions from these fields.