2011-04-30

SML (standard metalanguage)

4.24: news.adda/lang"sml (standard metalanguage):
. standard ml is influenced by
ISWIM (I see what it means)
which influenced not only ML,
but also many other functional languages
such as SASL, Miranda, and Haskell .
Landin's SECD machine used call-by-value;
if the imperative features are stripped out
(assignment and the J operator)
leaving a purely functional language,
it then becomes possible to switch to
lazy evaluation (vs eager evaluation);
that was the path of SASL,
KRC (Kent Recursive Calculator),
Hope, Miranda, Haskell, and Clean.
. A goal of ISWIM was to look more like
mathematical notation,
so it replaced ALGOL's ways with
the pythonic off-side rule
(newlines take the place of semicolons;
indentation represents parentheticals or begin-end pairs )
. abc and python are hardly the only off-siders:
* Boo * BuddyScript * Cobra * CoffeeScript
* Curry * F# (if #light "off" is not specified)
* Genie * Miranda * Nemerle * Occam
* PROMAL * Spin * XL * YAML .

news.adda/lang"CoffeeScript/a hll-to-hll translator:
. CoffeeScript compiles to JavaScript
adding syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby and Python
to enhance JavaScript's brevity and readability,
as well as adding more sophisticated features like
array comprehension and pattern matching.

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