Abstract
This paper was written in 1981 and published in Darlington Henderson and Turner (1982) pp 1–28. The volume comprised the lecture notes from a summer school on Functional Programming held at Newcastle University in July 1981, attended by 80 people. The paper includes an overview of Kent Recursive Calculator, a simple functional programming system based on higher order recursion equations and a series of programming examples. It is probably the earliest paper using list comprehensions applied to lazy lists and has the first published account of the “list of successes” method of eliminating backtracking, here applied to the eight queens problem. The method didn’t yet have a name. It was Phil Wadler who saw its importance and coined the phrase “list of successes” in his 1985 paper. It was also Phil who invented the term “list comprehensions” for what are here called “ZF expressions”.
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Notes
- 1.
KRC indexed lists starting from 1 rather than from 0.
- 2.
This function would now be called foldr; foldr and foldl with their now familiar definitions first appeared in the 1983 release of SASL.
- 3.
ZF expressions are now called “list comprehensions”, a term coined by Phil Wadler in 1985. The ZF expressions of 1981 KRC differ from modern list comprehensions in one significant respect — outputs of multiple generators are interleaved to ensure that all combinations are reached, even with two or more infinite generators.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was first published in Darlington et al. (1982) and I am grateful to CUP for permission to include it in this collection dedicated to Phil Wadler.
The Appendix which follows includes most of the KRC prelude as it stood in 1981. Many of the definitions — hd, tl, filter, map, product, sum, take, drop, and so on, will be familiar to contemporary functional programmers but it may be of historical interest.
A working implementation of Kent Recursive Calculator, including both the 1981 prelude and a more modern prelude, can found at http://krc-lang.org — I am most grateful to Martin Guy for translating my code from an obsolete dialect of BCPL to C and getting it working.
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Appendix - The KRC Prelude of Standard Definitions
Appendix - The KRC Prelude of Standard Definitions
In the following note that entries of the form
are comments and that infix “.” is functional composition.
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Turner, D.A. (1982). Recursion Equations as a Programming Language. In: Lindley, S., McBride, C., Trinder, P., Sannella, D. (eds) A List of Successes That Can Change the World. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9600. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30936-1_24
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