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International Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming

TFP 2012: Trends in Functional Programming pp 198–214Cite as

Lingua Franca of Functional Programming (FP)

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7829))

Abstract

Scheme is a minimalist language that brings its ancestor, LISP, on par with modern languages such as *ML and Haskell. Although it has very different tools in its repertoire (e.g., homoiconicity), many of the same techniques applied in other languages are also quite usable in Scheme. Some of them (e.g., pattern-matching, monadic and multi-stage programming, a notation for laziness) tend to be associated with other languages (primarily: Haskell and OCaml), and hence many programmers liking these constructs are drawn away from Scheme.

The concrete reason for this in FP community is the perceived verbosity of Scheme, while others (in particular, from the embedded community) have troubles adopting the more difficult concepts of FP in general. It is clear that there are approaches developed with FP that do help for productivity in hardware and software design. Transfer of this knowledge, however, is made difficult by an intellectual gap between the communities. In this paper we attempt to reconcile these two points of view by showing that (1) Scheme’s minimalistic but flexible approach can bring concrete benefits to the embedded community, and (2) none of these “advanced” features is particularly hard to replicate in a language such as Scheme. If one is willing to leverage Scheme’s hygienic macros, all of these features can be implemented separately as libraries and freely used together. No advanced compiler or interpreter modifications to implement such extensions are required for creating embedded DSLs in it.

To really see what Scheme (and homoiconicity) can bring to the domain of automated program construction, and to apply these ideas in practice to Software-Defined Radio (SDR) stacks, we have re-implemented a multi-staged, monadic FFT generator. In this paper we supplement it with a straightforward implementation of the C code-generation and Graphviz visualization back-ends and argue for a homoiconic, pure and total language to combine the best features of Scheme, Haskell and *ML.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. NXP Semiconductors Research, TU Delft, The Netherlands

    Peter Kourzanov & Henk Sips

Authors
  1. Peter Kourzanov
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  2. Henk Sips
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University, EH14 4AS, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

  2. Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, c/. Profesor José García Santesmases s/n, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Ricardo Peña

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Kourzanov, P., Sips, H. (2013). Lingua Franca of Functional Programming (FP). In: Loidl, HW., Peña, R. (eds) Trends in Functional Programming. TFP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7829. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40447-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40447-4_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40446-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40447-4

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