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International audience ; Law at large underpins modern society, codifying and governing many aspects of citizens' daily lives. Oftentimes, law is subject to interpretation, debate and challenges throughout various courts and jurisdictions. But in some other areas, law leaves little room for interpretation, and essentially aims to rigorously describe a computation, a decision procedure or, simply said, an algorithm. Unfortunately, prose remains a woefully inadequate tool for the job. The lack of formalism leaves room for ambiguities; the structure of legal statutes, with many paragraphs and subsections spread across multiple pages, makes it hard to compute the intended outcome of the algorithm underlying a given text; and, as with any other piece of poorly-specified critical software, the use of informal, natural language leaves corner cases unaddressed. We introduce Catala, a new programming language that we specifically designed to allow a straightforward and systematic translation of statutory law into an executable implementation. Catala aims to bring together lawyers and programmers through a shared medium, which together they can understand, edit and evolve, bridging a gap that too often results in dramatically incorrect implementations of the law. We have implemented a compiler for Catala, and have proven the correctness of its core compilation steps using the F ⋆ proof assistant. We evaluate Catala on several legal texts that are algorithms in disguise, notably section 121 of the US federal income tax and the byzantine French family benefits; in doing so, we uncover a bug in the official implementation of the French benefits. We observe as a consequence of the formalization process that using Catala enables rich interactions between lawyers and programmers, leading to a greater understanding of the original legislative intent, while producing a correct-by-construction executable specification reusable by the greater software ecosystem. Doing so, Catala increases trust in legal institutions, and mitigates ...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the international Joint Modular Languages Conference, JMLC 2003, held in Klagenfurt, Austria in August 2003. The 17 revised full papers and 10 revised short papers presented together with 5 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on architectural concepts and education, component architectures, language concepts, frameworks and design principles, compilers and tools, and formal aspects and reflective programming

The flipped classroom method, which could be considered as one of the crucial new generation teaching approaches, is a permutation of the educational activities that are carried out inside and outside of the classroom environment. The main purpose of the present study is to determine the impact of the flipped classroom approach on students' academic achievement and their attitudes toward programming and methodology at the higher education level. The current study employed a mixed research method as findings were transcribed on the basis of quantitative and qualitative data sets. Academic achievement tests and attitudes toward programming scales were used to collect quantitative data, whereas a semistructured focus group interview was used to collect the qualitative data set. The findings demonstrated that a statistically significant difference existed among the students in the experimental group and students within the control group regarding their attitudes toward programming and academic achievement. The results of the study reported that the experimental group had more positive attitudes and higher levels of academic achievement when compared with the control group. The advantages of the flipped classroom model include the elevated teacher–student interaction, raised independence in terms of accessing courses regardless of time and place, the opportunity to save time particularly during practicing, student-centered structure and increased motivation. This method also has many disadvantages. These include the need for technological requirements, students not watching videos, poor attendance to the course, and the lowered student–teacher interaction, especially outside the classroom.