On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 6:05 PM, Mark S. Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > A fair point. By "contracts" in that first word, we refer to > real-world contracts. For software "contracts", we initially had a > footnote trying to explain the relationship between the "smart > contracts" we're talking about and the type-like "contracts" that this > literature refers to. Perhaps unwisely, I removed it because I thought > it created more confusion than it cleared up. By introducing "the > exchange of rights" in that same first sentence I hope we make it > clear that we're talking about a different kind of contract, one > closer to the real world notion.
I disagree, in two senses. First, behavioral software contracts in the sense of Meyer have a close analogy to real-world contracts, in particular contracts for the exchange of goods. For example, a spot contract is just an agreement to exchange some good meeting some specified description for another (usually one is money). Second, I believe that your escrow contracts are closely related to software contracts, in the sense that we could formulate them as software contracts in a sufficiently-expressive contract system, where the contract/runtime system itself plays the role of trusted host. Sam > > I'll see if I can find the footnote I deleted, at least for the record > here on es-discuss ;). > > On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 2:57 PM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <[email protected]> > wrote: >> On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 5:46 PM, Mark S. Miller <[email protected]> wrote: >>> At >>> http://code.google.com/p/es-lab/downloads/detail?name=distr-erights-in-js.pdf >>> >>> Paper for invited talk at ESOP2013 http://www.etaps.org/2013/esop13 >>> Final already submitted, but comments of course appreciated anyway. >> >> Given that the first word of your abstract is "Contracts", it's >> surprising to me that you don't reference any of the quite extensive >> literature on software contracts, starting with Bertrand Meyer in the >> 80s, and continuing with Findler and Felleisen's work on higher-order >> contracts over the past 10+ years, which has even been implemented for >> JS by Tim Disney using proxies [1]. >> >> Sam >> >> [1] http://disnetdev.com/contracts.coffee/ > > > > -- > Cheers, > --MarkM _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
