Smart contracts are neither smart nor contracts
University of Copenhagen
COM2 Level 4
Executive Classroom, COM2-04-02
Abstract:
Smart contracts are programs written in a Java-like language run on one of the dominant blockchain/distributed ledger systems. We discuss why this makes them neither contracts nor is it necessarily smart to express them in an imperative, object-oriented Turing-complete programming language with tricky semantics.
Biodata:
Fritz Henglein is professor of programming languages and systems at DIKU, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH), head of research at Deon Digital A/G, director of the Research Center on Functional High-performance Computing for finance (HIPERFIT) at UCPH and chairman of the steering committee of the Danish Innovation Network on Finance IT. His research interests are in semantic, logical and algorithmic aspects of programming languages, specifically type inference, type-based program analysis, algorithmic functional programming and domain-specific languages; and the application of programming language technology, presently to high-performance stream processing (www.diku.dk/kmc), data-parallel programming (hiperfit.dk), and formal contracts for blockchain technology.