Hope (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:10, 31 December 2009

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'''Hope''' is a small [[functional (programming)|functional]] [[programming language]] developed in the 1970s at [[University of Edinburgh|Edinburgh University]]<ref name="BMS">Burstall R.M, McQueen D.B, Sanella D.T. (1980) ''Hope: An Experimental Applicative Language''. Conference Record of the 1980 LISP Conference, Stanford University, pp. 136-143.</ref>. It predates [[Miranda programming language|Miranda]] and [[Haskell (programming language)|Haskell]] and is contemporaneous with [[ML (programming language)|ML]] (also developed at Edinburgh). It is notable for being the first language with call-by-pattern evaluation and [[algebraic data type]]s. Hope is an important language in the development of functional programming.

The first published description of Hope was by Burstall, MacQueen and Sanella in 1980<ref>Burstall R.M, McQueen D.B, Sanella D.T. (1980) ''Hope: An Experimental Applicative Language''. Conference Record of the 1980 LISP Conference, Stanford University, pp. 136-143.</ref>. The name may have been derived from ''Hope Park Square'' in Edinburgh, at one time the ___location of the Department of Artificial Intelligence.

A Hope tutorial by Roger Bailey was featured in the August 1985 issue of [[Byte magazine|Byte]] on [[declarative programming]] <ref>http://www.devili.iki.fi/library/issue/136.en.html</ref>.

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Another way in which Hope differs from Haskell and [[:Category:ML programming language family|ML]] is that explicit type declarations in Hope are required: There is no option to use a type-inference algorithm in Hope.

The first implementation of Hope was [[strict evaluation|strict]], but since that one there have been [[lazy evaluation|lazy]] versions and strict versions with lazy constructors (the language described in <ref name="BMS"/> has a lazy constructor for lists only).

==References==