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Current Trends in Concurrency pp 122–207Cite as

Functional programming and the language tale

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 224))

Abstract

Chapter I is an introduction to functional programming, using informal (though precise) programs. Moreover, it is an introduction to chapter II, in which the functional language TALE is defined in a formal way. The definition of TALE consists of a core language based on the second order typed lambda calculus with recursive types and data types for tuples, unions and arrays. The semantics of the core language is given as a precisely defined reduction relation on expressions. The core language is extended in order to make programming more flexible. It is indicated how expressions in the extended language have to be translated to the core language. All purely functional languages are essentially based on the lambda calculus. Therefore TALE has a strong similarity to other such languages like SASL (Turner [1979a]), Miranda (Turner [1985]), LML (Augustsson [1984]) and HOPE (Burstall et al [1980]). Our motivation for introducing TALE was to give a complete description of a language with precise semantics and at the same time a flexible syntax for actual programming.

The authors are partially sponsored by the Dutch Ministery of Science and Education through the project "Parallel Reduction Machine". Chapter I is written by the first and II by the second author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mathematical Institute, Budapestlaan 6, 3508 TA, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Henk Barendregt & Marc van Leeuwen

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  1. Henk Barendregt
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  2. Marc van Leeuwen
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J. W. de Bakker W. -P. de Roever G. Rozenberg

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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Barendregt, H., van Leeuwen, M. (1986). Functional programming and the language tale. In: de Bakker, J.W., de Roever, W.P., Rozenberg, G. (eds) Current Trends in Concurrency. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 224. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027041

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027041

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-16488-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39827-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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