Paul Hudak
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Abstract
The foundations of functional programming languages are examined from both historical and technical perspectives. Their evolution is traced through several critical periods: early work on lambda calculus and combinatory calculus, Lisp, Iswim, FP, ML, and modern functional languages such as Miranda1 and Haskell. The fundamental premises on which the functional programming methodology stands are critically analyzed with respect to philosophical, theoretical, and pragmatic concerns. Particular attention is paid to the main features that characterize modern functional languages: higher-order functions, lazy evaluation, equations and pattern matching, strong static typing and type inference, and data abstraction. In addition, current research areas—such as parallelism, nondeterminism, input/output, and state-oriented computations—are examined with the goal of predicting the future development and application of functional languages.
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Reviews
Edward A. Schneider
Papers in Computing Surveys are meant to be surveys or tutorials. This paper serves both purposes for modern functional programming languages, although it does a better job as a survey. A good introduction to these languages is Hughes [1]. The first part of the paper is an excellent overview of the evolution of modern functional languages. The overview starts with the lambda calculus, goes through LISP, Backus's FP, ML and its Hindley-Milner typing, and Turner's SASL and its successors, and finally arrives at Haskell, a language recently designed by an international committee that included Hudak (Haskell is used for the examples in the remainder of the paper). The second section describes four features that distinguish modern functional languages from earlier languages—higher-order functions, lazy evaluation, data abstraction, and equations and pattern matching. The third section discusses recent innovations in functional programming and current research, including several ideas that are being tried in Haskell. These innovations include type classes to manage operator overloading, functional I/O, functional arrays, views (used to separate data representation from pattern matching—these were originally part of Haskell but have been removed), annotations for concurrent execution, explicit caches for memoization, nondeterministic operators, and logic variables. The last part of the paper attempts to dispel several myths about functional programming: functional programming is the antithesis of imperative programming; functional languages are toys; and functional languages cannot deal with state. Overall, the paper is well written and is an excellent summary of the current status of functional programming and how we got here. Some parts may be a little difficult for readers with no experience with functional languages: curried notation is used in the introduction long before it is introduced in the first section, for example. Also, the paper contains several annoyances and typos. For example, Hudak introduces the notation “ e 1 e 2” for application and then gives the notation “[ e 1/ x] e 2,” in which the subscripts are reversed, for substitution. The definition of the LISP function mapcar is poorly formatted. An example for a simple tree of integers is wrong. The type given for readFile is wrong. These problems are minor, however, and I highly recommend this paper to anyone with an interest in functional programming who would like to know the current status of these languages.
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