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Does anyone know why functional programming languages are so much favored by research teams over other types of PL ? Every time i hear someone doing PL research, it's always on some kind of functional programming language such as Haskell or ML.
Does anyone know why functional programming languages are so much favored by research teams over other types of PL ? Every time i hear someone doing PL research, it's always on some kind of functional programming language such as Haskell or ML.
There is, however, a lot of research about implementation going on using other languages as well. Most GC research, for example, is done using JVM and Java programs. For this particular paper, it would be really hard to choose a different platform, though, because GHC is one of the rare industrial runtimes that offer lightweight threads.
Is this a research paper, or a currently available library where I can download somewhere?
Is this a research paper, or a currently available library where I can download somewhere?
Does anyone know why functional programming languages are so much favored by research teams over other types of PL ? Every time i hear someone doing PL research, it's always on some kind of functional programming language such as Haskell or ML.
FPL research: Ok, we have this cool way to describe our computation. But how can we efficiently map this to the HW? In essence build a nice language and find an implementation.
Imperative PL research: Ok, we have this HW, how can we build an expressive PL on top of it? In essence build an implementation (the HW) and find a language.
Does anyone know why functional programming languages are so much favored by research teams over other types of PL ? Every time i hear someone doing PL research, it's always on some kind of functional programming language such as Haskell or ML.
It's not about functional programming languages per se, it's just that a lot of core/academic PL research often focuses much more on concepts than on implementation , and languages with strong type systems (all of which are functional, in part also because OO/subtyping is hard to reason about formally) are ideal for encoding these concepts. There is, however, a lot of research about implementation going on using othe…
BTW, Java has lightweight threads, too: https://github.com/puniverse/quasar (I'm the main author)
I've been wondering about garbage collection in pure functional languages lately. It is often said that statically typed pure functional languages allow the compiler to do a lot more correctness checking. Shouldn't the same formal reasoning features also enable much better garbage collection algorithms? Or would that be asking for a solution to the halting problem?
see e.g. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
Does anyone know why functional programming languages are so much favored by research teams over other types of PL ? Every time i hear someone doing PL research, it's always on some kind of functional programming language such as Haskell or ML.
It's not about functional programming languages per se, it's just that a lot of core/academic PL research often focuses much more on concepts than on implementation , and languages with strong type systems (all of which are functional, in part also because OO/subtyping is hard to reason about formally) are ideal for encoding these concepts. There is, however, a lot of research about implementation going on using othe…
Does anyone know why functional programming languages are so much favored by research teams over other types of PL ? Every time i hear someone doing PL research, it's always on some kind of functional programming language such as Haskell or ML.
Most really low level code generation and parsing research etc. will apply across the board or at least cover a wide range of type of languages (e.g. register allocation, instruction selection).
But consider type theory - a language like Haskell providers a lot wider scope for research in that area than e.g. C. Or garbage collection - admittedly that's more widely applicable, but many FP languages throw an extra factor into the mix with immutable variables. Etc.
But there's certainly other PL research as well. E.g. all the work that's gone into Javascript compilers in the last few years. Trace trees came out of work done on a JVM for example.