Leverhulme Lecture #1 - Compiler Tools for MATLAB

MATLAB is a popular dynamic programming language used for scientific and numerical programming. As a language, it has evolved from a small scripting language intended as an interactive interface to numerical libraries, to a very popular language supporting many language features and libraries.  The overloaded syntax and dynamic nature of the language, plus the somewhat organic addition of language features over the years, makes static analysis of modern MATLAB quite challenging.

In this talk I will motivate why it is important for programming language and compiler researchers to work on MATLAB and  I will provide a  high-level overview of McLab, a suite of compiler tools my group is

developing at McGill.   The main technical focus of the talk will be on

the foundational problem of resolving the meaning of an identifier in MATLAB.