John Reppy

I have been a faculty member at the University of Chicago since the Autumn of 2002. I spent the prior eleven years as an MTS at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

My primary area of research is the design and implementation of advanced programming languages. Such languages provide the best hope for increasing the quality and reliability of software, while also improving programmer productivity. Over the years, I have worked on the design and implementation of several advanced languages:

• The Manticore project is an effort to design and implement a language for programming multicore processors.

• The Moby programming language is a higher-order typed language with support for object-oriented and concurrent programming. The Moby project, which is joint work with Kathleen Fisher of AT&T Labs --- Research, provides a testbed for exploring ideas in language design and implementation. Using this testbed, we have explored the relationship between module and class mechanisms; language interoperability; and compiler transformations for functional languages.

• Concurrent ML is a concurrent programming language embedded in SML. Its most novel feature is first-class synchronous operations, which support user-defined communication and synchronization abstractions.

• I have been a contributor to the Standard ML of New Jersey system since abount 1990.

I am also interested in computer graphics (I designed the ray-tracer problem for the ICFP 2000 Programming Contest).