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Chameleon: The Gist of Dynamic Programming Languages

Authors:
Samuele Buro
Michele Pasqua
Isabella Mastroeni

Keywords: programming language design, dynamic programming languages, program static analysis

Abstract:
Dynamic programming languages, such as JavaScript and PHP, are widespread and heavily used. They provide very useful dynamic features, like run-time type inference, dynamic method calls, and built-in dynamic data structures. This makes it hard to build static analyzers, for automatic errors discovery. Yet, exploiting harmful behaviors in such programs, especially in web applications, can have significant impacts. In this paper, we present Chameleon, a core programming language summarizing the main features of the dynamic programming paradigm. Chameleon can be useful in defining, testing and comparing static analyses, aiming at preventing bugs and errors in programs written in dynamic programming languages. With Chameleon, static analysis experts could define and test control mechanisms without the burden to take in consideration the technical details characterizing a specific real-world programming language.

Pages: 13 to 17

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2019

Publication date: November 24, 2019

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4316

ISBN: 978-1-61208-755-9

Location: Valencia, Spain

Dates: from November 24, 2019 to November 28, 2019