Application Of Functional Languages Research Articles

The Peter Landin prize

The Peter Landin prize honours the best paper presented at each year's International Symposium on the Implementation and Application of Functional Languages (IFL). It has been awarded every year since 2003, and covers a range of topics including functional operating systems, static analysis for cost information of functional programs, techniques to improve array processing for data locality and parallelism, explicit parallel coordination, supercompilation, and a rational deconstruction of Landin's SECD machine itself. This article describes the history of the prize, explains why Peter Landin was chosen as nominee, and describes each of the articles that have been awarded the prize to date.

Applications of coarse-grained dataflow in computational mechanics

Dataflow models are free of side effects and have no notion of state or sequencing. Because these representations place a partial, as opposed to a total, ordering on the execution of their component operations, the concurrent aspects of computation are clearly revealed. The correspondence between dataflow graphs and purely functional programs allows computations to be expressed in a high-level functional language and subsequently transformed into a dataflow graph. This paper describes the use of dataflow models as an alternative control strategy for engineering analysis programs and contrasts them with traditional imperative approaches. The characteristics of functional languages are also described, as is their inherent parallelism, which may be realized by compilation into dataflow graphs. The application of functional languages to finite element programming is presented, which allows the alternating assembly and solution of system equations found in frontal solvers. Issues such as the incremental update of arrays and the simulation of state are also addressed.

Conception, evolution, and application of functional programming languages

The foundations of functional programming languages are examined from both historical and technical perspectives. Their evolution is traced through several critical periods: early work on lambda calculus and combinatory calculus, Lisp, Iswim, FP, ML, and modern functional languages such as Miranda 1 and Haskell. The fundamental premises on which the functional programming methodology stands are critically analyzed with respect to philosophical, theoretical, and pragmatic concerns. Particular attention is paid to the main features that characterize modern functional languages: higher-order functions, lazy evaluation, equations and pattern matching, strong static typing and type inference, and data abstraction. In addition, current research areas—such as parallelism, nondeterminism, input/output, and state-oriented computations—are examined with the goal of predicting the future development and application of functional languages.