Pure (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:33, 19 January 2025

Latest revision as of 15:26, 9 February 2025

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Pure comes with an [[Interpreter (computing)|interpreter]] and [[debugger]], provides [[Garbage collection (computer science)|automatic memory management]], has powerful functional and symbolic programming abilities, and interfaces to [[Library (computing)|libraries]] in [[C (programming language)|C]] (e.g., for numerics, low-level protocols, and other such tasks). At the same time, Pure is a ''small'' language designed from scratch; its interpreter is not large, and the library modules are written in Pure. The syntax of Pure resembles that of [[Miranda (programming language)|Miranda]] and [[Haskell]], but it is a [[free-format language]] and thus uses explicit [[delimiter]]s (rather than [[off-side rule]] indents) to denote program structure.

The Pure language is a successor of the equational programming language Q ,<ref> Q-Equational-Programming-Language https://q-lang.sourceforge.net/</ref>, previously created by the same author, Albert Gräf at the [[University of Mainz]], Germany. Relative to Q, it offers some important new features (such as local functions with [[lexical scoping]], efficient vector and matrix support, and the built-in C interface) and programs run much faster as they are [[Just-in-time compilation|compiled just-in-time]] to native code on the fly. Pure is mostly aimed at mathematical applications and [[scientific computing]] currently, but its interactive interpreter environment, the C interface and the growing set of addon modules make it suitable for a variety of other uses, such as [[artificial intelligence]], symbolic computation ,<ref>{{Cite web |title=REDUCE Related Projects |url=https://reduce-algebra.sourceforge.io/projects.php |access-date=2025-01-19 |website=REDUCE Computer Algebra System}}</ref>, and real-time multimedia processing <ref>FAUST https://faust.grame.fr/.</ref>

Pure [[Plug-in (computing)|plug-ins]] are available for the [[Gnumeric]] spreadsheet and Miller Puckette's [[Pure Data]] graphical multimedia software, which make it possible to extend these programs with functions written in the Pure language. Interfaces are also provided as library modules to [[GNU Octave]], [[OpenCV]], [[OpenGL]], the [[GNU Scientific Library]], [[FAUST (programming language)|FAUST]], [[SuperCollider]], and liblo (for [[Open Sound Control]] (OSC)).