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PyFL – new functional programming language from Bill Wadge

billwadge.com

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Re: PyFL – new functional programming language from Bill Wadge

#41

Post by HelloNurse »

ModernMech wrote: post #28
nsytk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell is more versatile: f(a, b) is a function applied to a single tuple, f a b is a function applied to two arguments. I do not understand the "instead of" in the cited part and it makes me somewhat skeptical (so does the "Py" in the name).

In Haskell, all functions take a single argument.

This "mandatory" currying is an useful and elegant simplification compared to other languages, but in practical terms if we write

      f a b
f has to work as a function of two arguments; that it is also formally interpretable, but not necessarily useful, as a function of one argument is only a nice bonus.

Re: PyFL – new functional programming language from Bill Wadge

#42

Post by HelloNurse »

throwaway4good wrote: post #23
ktpsns wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to look into Wolfram Mathematica. It has the syntax f[x,y] and a super extensive standard library, being otherwise very LISPy.

Wolfram has a wild standard library but as a language it is less than elegant.

I remember a distinctly kitchen sink design style in Mathematica language features about 20 years ago, how did it evolve?

Re: PyFL – new functional programming language from Bill Wadge

#43

Post by kragen »

Nice to see an article on news.ycombinator.com that actually uses the Y combinator. A particularly pleasant definition of it, too:

    Y(a) = g(g) where g(x) = a(x(x));
But I think in PyFL functions are not automatically curried, so that's only applicable to functions of one argument.

I like his syntactic sugar for what would be list comprehensions in Python:

    nprime = not exist p in primes: n mod p == 0 end;
rather than Python's

    nprime = not [p for p in primes if n % p == 0]
but I wonder if the Python/Haskell approach offers more composability.

Re: PyFL – new functional programming language from Bill Wadge

#47

Post by bade »

kseistrup wrote: post #46
akakievich wrote: post #2

Download is at https://pyflang.com/ . Wadge was a co-designer of Lucid, an influential dataflow language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language)

Does that download work for you? Not for me: 404

Fixed

Re: PyFL – new functional programming language from Bill Wadge

#48

Post by bade »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #14
smitty1e wrote: post #3

> min, max = bounds(x) Doesn't Python already de-structure? Repackaged: does PyFL lose touch with the regular language?

I had the same thought. There was surprisingly little discussion of how this new language relates to Python - the only mention on the whole page is that need Python installed to use it. At pyflang.com it says that "PyFL = Python based Functional Language". I'd be curious to know: Does PyFL benefit from Python's libraries, in the way that Scala and Clojure can use Java libraries? Are there any syntactic similarities?…

My bad, it's implemented in Python. But it uses one Python library, mathplotlib,although I commented out the code cause mathplotlib is a pain to install.
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