Hasil untuk "African languages and literature"

Nguyet-Anh H. Lang, Eric Lang, Thanh Le-Cong et al.

Functional programming provides strong foundations for developing reliable and secure software systems, yet its adoption remains not widespread due to the steep learning curve. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation present new opportunities to lower these barriers. However, extensive evaluations of LLMs largely focus on imperative programming languages, and their capabilities in functional programming languages (FP) remain underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce FPEval, a holistic evaluation framework built on FPBench, a new benchmark of 721 programming tasks across three difficulty levels on three mainstream FP languages: Haskell, Ocaml and Scala. FPEval provides compehensive evaluation infrastructures with both test validations with comprehensive test suites and static analysis tools to assess both functional correctness and code style and maintainability. Using this framework, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, and GPT-5, for code generation in functional programming languages and Java as an imperative baseline. Our results demonstrate that LLM performance in functional programming improves substantially with model advancement; however, error rates remain significantly higher in purely functional languages (Haskell and OCaml) than in hybrid (Scala) or imperative (Java) languages. Moreover, LLMs frequently generate non-idiomatic functional code that follows imperative patterns, raising concerns about code style and long-term maintainability. Finally, we show that LLMs can partially self-repair both correctness and quality issues when provided with static analysis feedback and hand-crafted instructions for common types of issues.

Baudouin Le Charlier

I present the most fundamental features of an implemented system designed to manipulate representations of regular languages. The system is structured into two layers, allowing regular languages to be represented in an increasingly compact, efficient, and integrated way. Both layers are first presented at a high level, adequate to design and prove the correctness of abstract algorithms. Then, their low-level implementations are described meticulously. At the high level, the first layer offers a notion of normalized regular expressions ensuring that the set of all syntactic derivatives of an expression is finite. At the low level, normalized expressions are uniquely represented by identifiers, i.e. by standard integers. The second layer, called the background, introduces additional notions to record, integrate, and simplify things computed within the first layer. At the high level, normalized expressions denoting the same regular language can be unified by grouping them into equivalence classes. One shortest expression is chosen in each class as its representative, which can be used to form equations relating expressions to their derivatives. This paper also presents extensive experimental results to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework and, in particular, the fact that it makes it possible to represent large sets of regular languages in a unified way where distinct identifiers designate different languages, represented by both a small expression and a minimal deteministic automaton.

Cheryl Fok

In light of recent controversies surrounding judicial flogging in the customary courts of Botswana, this article surveys journalistic coverage of the issue and seeks to establish an account of flogging as a cultural practice. Drawing on legal, sociocultural, and phenomenological perspectives, it argues that flogging is deeply embedded in social hierarchies of age, rank, and morafe membership, and can be interpreted as a disciplinary practice aimed primarily at unruly youths. Morafe elders teach proper modes of public comportment that involve managing thoughts and behaviors, a practice termed here bodily modulation. Through bodily modulation, individuals convey an understanding of botho, or ‘humanness,’ expressing their existential interdependence with others and cultivating the social relationships that sustain their personhood. Flogging and its enmeshment with other aspects of Tswana life point to the theme of undifferentiated potency in Tswana thought, of which law is only one instantiation among others.

Vadim Dyachkov

Yusuke Inoue, Kenji Hashimoto, Hiroyuki Seki

The definition of period in finite-state Markov chains can be extended to regular languages by considering the transitions of DFAs accepting them. For example, the language $(ΣΣ)^*$ has period two because the length of a recursion (cycle) in its DFA must be even. This paper shows that the period of a regular language appears as a cyclic group within its syntactic monoid. Specifically, we show that a regular language has period $P$ if and only if its syntactic monoid is isomorphic to a submonoid of a semidirect product between a specific finite monoid and the cyclic group of order $P$. Moreover, we explore the relation between the structure of Markov chains and our result, and apply this relation to the theory of probabilities of languages. We also discuss the Krohn-Rhodes decomposition of finite semigroups, which is strongly linked to our methods.

Caleb Kim, Pai Li, Anshuman Mohan et al.

Compilers for accelerator design languages (ADLs) translate high-level languages into application-specific hardware. ADL compilers rely on a hardware control interface to compose hardware units. There are two choices: static control, which relies on cycle-level timing; or dynamic control, which uses explicit signalling to avoid depending on timing details. Static control is efficient but brittle; dynamic control incurs hardware costs to support compositional reasoning. Piezo is an ADL compiler that unifies static and dynamic control in a single intermediate language (IL). Its key insight is that the IL's static fragment is a refinement of its dynamic fragment: static code admits a subset of the run-time behaviors of the dynamic equivalent. Piezo can optimize code by combining facts from static and dynamic submodules, and it opportunistically converts code from dynamic to static control styles. We implement Piezo as an extension to an existing dynamic ADL compiler, Calyx. We use Piezo to implement an MLIR frontend, a systolic array generator, and a packet-scheduling hardware generator to demonstrate its optimizations and the static-dynamic interactions it enables.

Michel Steuwer, Thomas Koehler, Bastian Köpcke et al.

The trend towards specialization of software and hardware - fuelled by the end of Moore's law and the still accelerating interest in domain-specific computing, such as machine learning - forces us to radically rethink our compiler designs. The era of a universal compiler framework built around a single one-size-fits-all intermediate representation (IR) is over. This realization has sparked the creation of the MLIR compiler framework that empowers compiler engineers to design and integrate IRs capturing specific abstractions. MLIR provides a generic framework for SSA-based IRs, but it doesn't help us to decide how we should design IRs that are easy to develop, to work with and to combine into working compilers. To address the challenge of IR design, we advocate for a language-oriented compiler design that understands IRs as formal programming languages and enforces their correct use via an accompanying type system. We argue that programming language techniques directly guide extensible IR designs and provide a formal framework to reason about transforming between multiple IRs. In this paper, we discuss the design of the Shine compiler that compiles the high-level functional pattern-based data-parallel language RISE via a hybrid functional-imperative intermediate language to C, OpenCL, and OpenMP. We compare our work directly with the closely related pattern-based Lift IR and compiler. We demonstrate that our language-oriented compiler design results in a more robust and predictable compiler that is extensible at various abstraction levels. Our experimental evaluation shows that this compiler design is able to generate high-performance GPU code.

Keehang Kwon, Daeseong Kang

Although the notion of qualified names is popular in module systems, it causes severe complications. In this paper, we propose an alternative to qualified names. The key idea is to import the declarations in other modules to the current module before they are used. In this way, all the declarations can be accessed locally. However, this approach is not efficient in memory usage. Our contribution is the {\it module weakening} scheme which allows us to import the minimal parts. As an example of this approach, we propose a module system for functional languages.

Vikraman Choudhury, Jacek Karwowski, Amr Sabry

The $\mathitΠ$ family of reversible programming languages for boolean circuits is presented as a syntax of combinators witnessing type isomorphisms of algebraic datatypes. In this paper, we give a denotational semantics for this language, using the language of weak groupoids à la Homotopy Type Theory, and show how to derive an equational theory for it, presented by 2-combinators witnessing equivalences of reversible circuits. We establish a correspondence between the syntactic groupoid of the language and a formally presented univalent subuniverse of finite types. The correspondence relates 1-combinators to 1-paths, and 2-combinators to 2-paths in the universe, which is shown to be sound and complete for both levels, establishing full abstraction and adequacy. We extend the already established Curry-Howard correspondence for $\mathitΠ$ to a Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondence between Reversible Logic, Reversible Programming Languages, and Symmetric Rig Groupoids, by showing that the syntax of $\mathitΠ$ is presented by the free symmetric rig groupoid, given by finite sets and permutations. Our proof uses techniques from the theory of group presentations and rewriting systems to solve the word problem for symmetric groups. Using the formalisation of our results, we show how to perform normalisation-by-evaluation, verification, and synthesis of reversible logic gates, motivated by examples from quantum computing.

Valeria Cardoso Silva

No romance As Mulheres do Imperador, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa cria a inter­secção entre países afro-lusófonos: Moçambique e Portugal, atravessando a escrita africana durante a História Colonial, onde o apagamento do outro é evidenciado.

Amaro Duarte, Esmitt Ramirez

There are tools to ease the 2D/3D graphics development for programmers. Sometimes, these are not directly accessible for all users requiring commercial licenses or based on trials, or long learning periods before to use them. In the modern world, the time to release final programs is crucial for the company successfully, also for saving money. Then, if programmers can handle tools to minimize the development time using well-known programming languages, they can deliver final programs on time, with minimum effort. This concept is the goal of this paper, offering a tool to create 3D renders over a familiarize programming language to speed up the web development time process. We present an extension of an interpreted programming language with an easy syntax to display 3D graphics on the web generating a template in a well-known web programming language, which can be customized and extended. Our proposal is based on Lua programming language as the input language for programmers, offering a web editor which interprets its syntax and exporting templates in WebGL over Javascript, also getting immediate output in a web browser. Tests show the effectiveness of our approach focus on the written code lines, also getting the expected output using a few computational resources.

Jan Baumeister, Bernd Finkbeiner, Matthis Kruse et al.

Runtime monitors that are specified in a stream-based monitoring language tend to be easier to understand, maintain, and reuse than those written in a standard programming language. Because of their formal semantics, such specification languages are also a natural choice for safety-critical applications. Unlike for standard programming languages, there is, however, so far very little support for automatic code optimization. In this paper, we present the first collection of code transformations for the stream-based monitoring language RTLola. We show that classic compiler optimizations, such as Sparse Conditional Constant Propagation and Common Subexpression Elimination, can be adapted to monitoring specifications. We also develop new transformations -- Pacing Type Refinement and Filter Refinement -- which exploit the specific modular structure of RTLola as well as the implementation freedom afforded by a declarative specification language. We demonstrate the significant impact of the code transformations on benchmarks from the monitoring of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).

O. Tom-lawyer, Michael Thomas

This paper seeks to analyse the hegemony of the English language in Western Africa. The originality of the approach stems from its reading of hegemony through the lens of educational policies and the socio-economic functions of the language and its examination of the premise that there is a positive link between English and development contexts (Coleman, 2010). The study aims to fill a gap in existing research on the role of English in the development of Western Africa by exploring the usefulness of English’s linguistic hegemony in the region, and to counter the negative connotations that it has always attracted. Based on a critical review of the research literature between 2003 and 2018, the paper concludes that the hegemony of English has resulted in the development of anglophone countries in Western Africa, while in the francophone/lusophone regions, industrial backwardness and low literacy rates have been consequences of English language marginalisation. In conclusion, it recommends, amongst other implications, the need for the early introduction of English into French curricula.

Louisemarié Combrink, Nicholas P.L. Allen

Installation art has been critically interpreted with reference to themes or situations, the transgressive nature of this art form, place and space, material, or immersion and embodied perception. To a lesser degree, installation art’s narrative possibilities have also been explored. However, the centrality of character as a narratological tool for the interpretation of installation art has not yet been comprehensively investigated. As the viewer in installation art is transformed into an active participant by virtue of physically entering and ‘completing’ the work, it is argued that he or she also becomes a character in the storyworld of the artwork. Furthermore, it is posited that this participant-character becomes a focaliser who co-constructs the narrative suggested by the work by engaging with the narrativised elements presented in the work, often together with suggested absences at which the work hints. This article shows that character as a narratological tool creates interpretative possibilities for installation art and adds new dimensions to the narrative potential of this art form. Using character (and absence) in the South African installation artist Jan van der Merwe’s work Biegbak/Confessional (2003) as an example, an expansion of the narratological toolbox of installation art is suggested, that could find broader application in many works in this genre.

Paul Emmerich, Simon Ellmann, Fabian Bonk et al.

Drivers are written in C or restricted subsets of C++ on all production-grade server, desktop, and mobile operating systems. They account for 66% of the code in Linux, but 39 out of 40 security bugs related to memory safety found in Linux in 2017 are located in drivers. These bugs could have been prevented by using high-level languages for drivers. We present user space drivers for the Intel ixgbe 10 Gbit/s network cards implemented in Rust, Go, C#, Java, OCaml, Haskell, Swift, JavaScript, and Python written from scratch in idiomatic style for the respective languages. We quantify costs and benefits of using these languages: High-level languages are safer (fewer bugs, more safety checks), but run-time safety checks reduce throughput and garbage collection leads to latency spikes. Out-of-order CPUs mitigate the cost of safety checks: Our Rust driver executes 63% more instructions per packet but is only 4% slower than a reference C implementation. Go's garbage collector keeps latencies below 100 $μ$s even under heavy load. Other languages fare worse, but their unique properties make for an interesting case study. All implementations are available as free and open source at https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages.

P. Simpson, Andrea Mayr, Simon Statham

and offer an examination of some of the major political trials of the post-Stalin Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia. Included are an analysis of political trials of the Kruschev and Brezhnev peri-ods, trials for economic crimes and corruption scandals during the transition period and Gorbachev’s early years, the impact of glasnost on political trials, the political rehabilitation of victims of Stalin, and the case against the Communist Party after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This study examines the use of political trials by the South African apartheid regime against its opponents in the 1970s. Tracing the early history of the South African Students Organization and the Black People’s Convention, Lobban argues that the state reacted to the threat posed by the black consciousness movement by launching a trial of ideas, using the Terrorism Act. Analyzing trial transcripts, he explores how the prosecution policy and legal strategy of the state changed during the decade as the nature of the threats it faced altered. He concludes that the political trial was perhaps the only venue where white ideology had to engage directly with black protest. This survey work synthesizes case-study and local-level material on the history of crime and punishment in England and standardizes the debates and issues for the student reader. Historians Briggs and colleagues examine the state’s responses to crimi-nality over 900 years of English history. They argue that notions of control, policing, punishment, and retribution are categories as problematic for historians as “crime” and “criminal” themselves. They analyze the connection between alienation, particularly of the young, and crime rates, and contend that imprisonment has never prevented crime or reformed criminals. They conclude that when English society has not been at ease with itself, it has suffered the ravages of crime. surveys the range of what he describes as German” legal philosophy. He examines critical rationalism, discourse theory, rhetorical theory, sys-tems theory, and institutional legal positivism, and offers biographical information on the principal proponents of each theory and references to relevant Anglo-American literature. He discusses the central premises of each theory, important critiques, and their level of acceptance within German literature. definition. He concludes that what is needed is a postmodem description of the new Europe, characterized by difference, particularity, and justice. sumptuary laws-which regulated conspicuous consumption for dress, ornaments, food, and expenditure for weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage throughout the medieval and early modem Europe-as attempts to stabilize social recognizability in the urban “world of strangers.” He also examines the connection between sumptuary projects and class relations and gender relations and their interac-tion with projects directed at the reform of popular culture. He traces the transforma-tions in which sumptuary regulations were swallowed by dominant discourses of protectionist economic practices. He concludes that sumptuary regulations did not simply die but persist in the modem world dispersed throughout a range of both private and public forms of governance of personal appearance and private consumption. overview of the litigation resulting from the use of Bendectin by pregnant women. compares individual and collective forms of litigation in which widespread to chemicals or drugs results in large numbers of claimants. examines the difficulties, uncertainties, and limitations of the sciences in assessing the toxicity of agents and analyzes the conflicts between scientific and legal “proof” and the concomitant misunderstanding between scientists and lawyers about the role of science in providing evidence in the legal system.

Hannelie Marx Knoetze

Within the South African and Belgian contexts, Public Service Television remains a key role player in the dissemination of ideas around national identity. Moreover, whiteness manifests as one aspect of national identity in both contexts and remains (to differing degrees) a normative construction. This article presents the findings of a controlled case comparison of a sample from two community soap operas (7de Laan and Thuis, broadcast by the South African (SABC) and Flemish (VRT) Public Service Broadcasters respectively) from the perspective of Critical Whiteness Studies. What my analysis sought to investigate was how the politics of belonging play out in these PSB narratives and the possible implications this holds for local as well as global discourses of whiteness and power in Public Service Media. The analysis revealed three rhetorical devices which function to maintain whiteness as hegemonic ideology in both texts despite the fact that they originate in disparate contexts.

Barasa, David

Vowels in Ateso, an Eastern Nilotic language, are subject to Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony. Accordingly, the vowels are divided into two harmony sets which differ in terms of tongue root position. The two sets of tongue root position are the Advanced Tongue Root [+ATR] set and the Retracted Tongue Root [-ATR] set. Comparably, Bari and Lutuko, related Eastern Nilotic languages, have a ten-vowel system consisting of five closed and five open vowels, with clearly discernible laws of ATR vowel harmony (Tucker & Bryan 1966ː 444). A similar system applies to Ateso which has the following nine phonemic vowels: /i ɪ e ɛ u ʊ o ɔ a/ and the phonetic vowel [ä]. The presence of the [ä] variant is conditioned by neighbouring [+ATR] vowels or glides, and hence does not have phonemic status; instead, it is treated as an allophone of /a/. In this paper, I follow the general discussion of vowel harmony in African languages (e.g. by Casali (2003, 2008)), albeit in Ateso. Firstly, I introduce the Ateso vowel articulatory parameters and the phonetic realisation of /a/. Secondly, I show that in Ateso /a/ behaves like an underlying [-ATR] vowel and that, generally, though the ATR affects tongue height and thereby accounts for the relative tongue height, ATR is not a category of tongue height but rather of the position of the tongue root. Lastly, I demonstrate that Ateso ATR vowel harmony has two dimensions. One is the condition that vowels ideally belong to a [-ATR] or [+ATR] set within a word and the second is that there is a dynamic dimension where ATR qualities may change as a result of affixation.

Marius Crous

This article examines the representation of masculinity in André Brink’s novel, The Rights of Desire. Following a remark in Roger Boylan’s review of the novel in the Boston Review; this analysis concentrates on Brink’s depiction of Afrikaner masculinity and the idea that the character Ruben Olivier represents Brink’s conception of the contemporary Afrikaner male, in particular the older Afrikaner male. This is an attempt at determining the validity of Robert Morrell’s thesis on masculinity, namely that it is about “men making and remaking masculinity, about challenging hegemonic masculinity and reconstituting it.” The question is whether Brink’s portrayal of Afrikaner masculinity confronts the hegemonic and patriarchal power structures associated with Afrikaner men, and whether it provides the reader with a new perspective on Afrikaner masculinity. This article investigates Brink’s representation of firstly, the ways Afrikaner men relate to other men, and secondly, the depiction of Afrikaner men in relation to their social class and to women.

Charl-Pierre Naudé