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Record W4412989434 · doi:10.1145/3747518

Multi-stage Programming with Splice Variables

2025· article· en· W4412989434 on OpenAlex
Tsung-Ju Chiang, Ningning Xie

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicLogic, programming, and type systems
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsStage (stratigraphy)spliceComputer scienceGeologyBiologyPaleontologyGenetics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Multi-stage programming is a popular approach to typed meta-programming, reducing abstraction overhead and producing performant programs. However, the traditional quote-and-splice staging syntax, as introduced by Rowan Davies in 1996, can introduce complexities in managing expression evaluation, and also often necessitates sophisticated mechanisms for advanced features such as code pattern matching. This paper introduces λ ○▷ , a novel staging calculus featuring let-splice bindings, a construct that explicitly binds splice expressions to splice variables, providing flexibility in managing, sharing, and reusing splice computations. Inspired by contextual modal type theory, our type system associates types with a typing context to capture variables dependencies of splice variables. We demonstrate that this mechanism seamlessly scales to features like code pattern matching, by formalizing λ ○▷ pat , an extension of λ ○▷ with code pattern matching and rewriting. We establish the syntactic type soundness of both calculi. Furthermore, we define a denotational semantics using a Kripke-style model, and prove adequacy results. All proofs have been fully mechanized using the Agda proof assistant.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.648
Threshold uncertainty score0.881

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0050.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.282
Teacher spread0.258 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it