Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering (functional pearl)

  • Authors:
  • Simon Peyton Jones;Jean-Marc Eber;Julian Seward

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research, Cambridge;LexiFi Technologies, Paris;University of Glasgow

  • Venue:
  • ICFP '00 Proceedings of the fifth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Financial and insurance contracts do not sound like promising territory for functional programming and formal semantics, but in fact we have discovered that insights from programming languages bear directly on the complex subject of describing and valuing a large class of contracts.We introduce a combinator library that allows us to describe such contracts precisely, and a compositional denotational semantics that says what such contracts are worth. We sketch an implementation of our combinator library in Haskell. Interestingly, lazy evaluation plays a crucial role.