1. FP and related stuff
Regarding Jeff Zeitlin question/Robert Craig answer about FP:
Well, that's something I'd like to open my big mouth about ;) ...
Since I'm currently doing my own master thesis on a related subject (for the
curious, functional languages), I'm familiar with some references if Jeff or
some of you people are interested about this exciting way of programming.
Original publication of Backus breakthrough with the FP system is
"Can Programming be Liberated from the Von Neumann Style?", J. Backus,
Communications of the ACM, 21, 8, pp.613-641, 1978
and I'm sorry to say there's no electronic copy of this paper available.
Regarding implementations of FP, you can found an old one at
gatekeeper.dec.com,
in directory pub/usenet/comp.sources.unix/volume13/funcproglang. A slight
variant of FP was implemented as "Illinois FP", and can be found somewhere
in the ftp a.cs.uiuc.edu (not sure about directory).
Anyways, functional languages (which as Robert Craig said have only expressions
and not a single sentence) have gone along a lot of progress since then. I
recommend you taking a look at the comp.lang.functional FAQ, in
where there's a lot of information about the state of the art of these kind
of languages. The idea of atom and sequence is a cornerstone of almost all
these languages, Haskell being the most advanced of them. As an example,
this is polymorphic quicksort in Haskell-style:
qsort [] = []
qsort x:xs = qsort [a| a <- xs, a<=x] ++ [x] ++ qsort [a| a <- xs, a>x]
(Yes, this is an executable program!)
I'd be glad to help any of you who wants to "make some tourism" in this
fascinating subject... :)
Carlos Gonzalia, Argentina, South America.
