Hancock

Hancock is a C-based domain-specific language designed to make it easy to read, write, and maintain programs that manipulate large amounts of relatively uniform data. Because Hancock is embedded in C, it inherits all the functionality of C. Valid C programs are also valid Hancock programs, and Hancock programs can use libraries written for C. But Hancock is more than C. In addition to C constructs, Hancock provides domain-specific forms to facilitate large-scale data processing.

For a given data-processing task, Hancock may be suitable if:

• The task requires a small number of linear passes over a relatively uniform data source.
• The task requires storing persistent information.

New in Version 2.0

Hancock 2.0 maps are always keyed by values of type long long. Such maps use a new mechanism for conveying the legal range of keys and for tuning their on-disk representations. Hancock 2.0 introduces a new type, called generative streams, for streams that do not have a physical representation. Finally, Hancock 2.0 comes with a small library of stream types, which facilitate iterating over various combinations of maps.

Version 2.0.1

Version 2.0.2

Obtaining Hancock

Documentation and papers

• Hancock Manual
  ( ps) ( pdf)
  K.Fisher, K.Hogstedt, A.Rogers, and F.Smith.
  

• Journal paper
  ( ps) ( pdf)
  K.Fisher, K.Hogstedt, A.Rogers, and F.Smith.
  

• Hancock: A Language for Extracting Signatures from Data Streams
  ( Abstract) ( ps) ( pdf)
  C.Cortes, K.Fisher, D.Pregibon, A.Rogers, and F.Smith.
  In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2000, pages 9-17. Conference slides ( ps) ( pdf).
  

• Hancock: A Language for Processing Very Large-Scale Data
  (Abstract) ( ps) ( pdf)
  D.Bonachea, K.Fisher, A.Rogers, and F.Smith.
  In USENIX 2nd Conference on Domain-Specific Languages,
  1999, pages 163-176.

People

• Kathleen Fisher
• Karin Hogstedt
• Anne Rogers
• Fred Smith

Affiliates

• Corinna Cortes
• Daryl Pregibon
• Dan Bonachea

Inquiries