New Berkeley Prelim Syllabus

I volunteered to help rethink the language design portion of the Berkeley prelim syllabus this week. Increasing the challenge is that we're cutting down from 60+ articles from before to only 36. We're shooting for about 6 core technical papers, and hoping there will be overlap with other areas (e.g., semantics, type theory, verification, optimization).

For my first pass, I've been thinking:

1. macros
2. continuations: on implementing prolog in functional programming
3. meta object protocol + messages: mirrors
4. type-directed programming: more types for nested data parallel programming

Any ideas for particulars or topic areas? For macros, I had been considering Shriram's swine before perl or Adapting Object-Oriented Frameworks to FRP. There are also some lightweight but useful papers, such as Hoare's Hints on Programming-Language Design. I couldn't think of anything sufficiently motivated for laziness (e.g., stream processing is pretty weak and equational reasoning is iffy).

Fun exercise :)

I'll try to post soon about some of the fun PL design / analysis / optimization work I've been doing. We just finished a camera ready for a workshop but I won't be writing up any of my bigger papers (SIMD tree layouts, multicore scheduling, CSS semantics / layout engine synthesis, and adoption-oriented languages) until later this year. Need to kickstart the writing process :)