NYC LOCAL: Tuesday 20 November 2007 New York FP Meetup: Anton van Straaten on Functions, Contracts, the Lazy, the Eager, and the SEC

[secretary@lxny.org]

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<blockquote
  what="official New York Functional Programmers Meetup announcement"
  source-url="http://lisp.meetup.com/59/calendar/6617972"
  edits="some, because the web page had much stuff"
  note="The Meetup system provides a notification service, so likely
       "we will not forward future notices."
  nb="You must RSVP via Meetup web page in order to attend.">

 Subject: The New York Functional Programmers November Meetup -  The New York Functional Programmers Meetup Group (Brooklyn, NY) - Meetup.com
 X-URL: http://lisp.meetup.com/59/calendar/6617972/

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    The New York Functional Programmers Meetup Group
      * Welcome
      * About Us
      * Calendar
      * Members
      * Photos
      * Messages
      * Polls
      * Files
      * Promote!

    Organizer:
    Brian Hurt
    Asst. Organizers:
    Howard Mansell, Markus

 RSVP for The New York Functional Programmers November Meetup

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    When:
           Tuesday, November 20, 2007, 7:00 PM 20071121T000000Z

    Where:
           ANSI Headquarters
           25 W 43rd Street near 5th Ave
           NY, NY 10036

    Description:

           This is the official meeting for this month.

           Anton van Straaten is giving a talk, "Functional Financial
           Contracts in Haskell and OCaml". His description:

           This talk will discuss the approach to modeling financial
           contracts originally presented in the paper "Composing
           contracts: an adventure in financial engineering"[*] by
           Peyton-Jones, Eber and Seward. According to the paper's
           abstract:

           "Financial and insurance contracts do not sound like promising
           territory for functional programming and formal semantics, but
           in fact we have discovered that insights from programming
           languages bear directly on the complex subject of describing and
           valuing a large class of contracts.

           "We introduce a combinator library that allows us to describe
           such contracts precisely, and a compositional denotational
           semantics that says what such contracts are worth. We sketch an
           implementation of our combinator library in Haskell.
           Interestingly, lazy evaluation plays a crucial role."

           The approach described in the paper provides a precise way to
           specify financial contracts, value them, and process their
           evolution through time. To achieve this, it uses a
           domain-specific embedded language, exploiting concepts and
           techniques from programming language theory.

           The talk will provide an overview of this approach and its
           advantages, along with a simple implementation of the core
           concepts in the paper, presented in Haskell and OCaml[2]. The
           programming language theory features exploited by the paper will
           be analyzed.

           No prior knowledge of financial contracts or programming
           language theory is required, but some knowledge of a functional
           programming language such as Haskell or ML will help.

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 RSVP now to attend this Meetup!

    Your RSVP lets us keep you up-to-date with any changes and saves you a
    spot when space is limited.
    Can you attend?

    (_) Yes (_) Maybe (_) No, but join me to this group

    RSVP!

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Distributed poC TINC:

Jay Sulzberger <secretary@lxny.org>
Corresponding Secretary LXNY
LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization.
http://www.lxny.org