User:Jpoial

Pöial graduated from Nõo Secondary School in 1977 and from the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Tartu in 1982. He completed postgraduate study at Tartu University in 1985 and received the degree of Candidate of Technical Sciences in 1987 at the Institute of Cybernetics. His dissertation was titled Spetsifikatsii FORT-programm i ikh primenenie v sistemakh postroeniia transliatorov ("Specifications of FORTH programs and their application in compiler-construction systems").^[1]

From 1985 to 1986, he was a researcher in the Applied Mathematics Laboratory of Tartu University. From 1986 to 1989, he was a senior lecturer in the Chair of Programming, and from 1989 to 1993 an associate professor in the same department. He became the first head of the Institute of Computer Science established in 1993, and served there as an associate professor from 1993 to 2004; in 2001 he was again head of the institute. From 2004 to 2017, he was a senior lecturer at the Estonian Information Technology College. Since 2017, he has been an associate professor at the IT College of Tallinn University of Technology. He has taught programming and programming languages, computer use, algorithms and data structures, Java programming, UNIX systems, graphical user interface design, and program analysis, and has also prepared teaching materials.^[1]

From 2011 to 2015, he was a visiting lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology. He was also a member of the founding committee of the Estonian Unix Users Group.^[2] From 2012 to 2018, he was a member of the assessment council of the Estonian Quality Agency for Higher and Vocational Education.^[1]

Pöial's research areas include computer science, especially programming languages, compilers, program specification, program analysis, and mathematical semigroups. He has been a member of the Forth Interest Group in the United States and of the EuroFORTH program committee. He has published over 35 scientific publications.^[1]

The author’s scientific contributions center on the formal analysis of stack-based programming languages, especially Forth. The author developed an algebraic framework for describing stack effects, treating programs as transformations between stack states and equipping those transformations with operations such as composition, partial ordering, and greatest lower bound. This work showed that correctness questions for syntax-directed translation schemes and generated stack programs could be reduced to the solvability of systems of inequalities over formal specifications, linking compiler correctness to algebraic methods. In later work, the same ideas were extended into static-analysis tools for typeless stack languages through an external type system with subtype relations, polymorphic stack variables, branch merging via greatest lower bound, and idempotent approximations for loops, providing a practical method for checking stack discipline in legacy code. (This paragraph was generated by ChatGPT)

• Some ideas on formal specification of Forth programs. In: 9th EuroFORTH Conference on the FORTH Programming Language and FORTH Processors. Marianske Lazne, 1993.
• Algebraic specification of stack effects. In: FORTH Dimensions XVI (1994), no. 4.
• A Forth-oriented compiler compiler and its applications (with M. Tombak and V. Sool). In: FORTH Dimensions XVI (1995), no. 5.
• Remarks on language extensibility. In: Annales Universitatis Scientiarum Budapestinensis de Rolando Eötvös Nominatae. Sectio Computatorica, XVII (1998).
• Lambda-superposition of stack languages. In: 7th Symposium on Programming Languages and Software Tools. Szeged, 2001.
• Program analysis for stack based languages. In: Proceedings of the 19th EuroForth Conference. Ross-on-Wye, 2003.
• Implementation of directed multigraphs in Java. In: Proceedings of PPPJ03, 2nd International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Programming in Java. Kilkenny, 2003.
• Pöial, J. (2021). "Challenges of Teaching Programming in StackOverflow Era". In: M. E. Auer and T. Rüütmann (eds.), Educating Engineers for Future Industrial Revolutions: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2020), Tallinn, 23-25 September 2020. Springer, pp. 68-75. (Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 1328).