Hope (programming language)

Hope is a small functional programming language developed in the 1970s at the University of Edinburgh.[1][2] It predates Miranda and Haskell and is contemporaneous with ML, also developed at the University. Hope was derived from NPL,[3] a simple functional language developed by Rod Burstall and John Darlington in their work on program transformation.[4] NPL and Hope are notable for being the first languages with call-by-pattern evaluation and algebraic data types.[5]

Hope was named for Sir Thomas Hope (c. 1681–1771), a Scottish agricultural reformer, after whom Hope Park Square in Edinburgh, the location of the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the time of the development of Hope, was also named.

  1. ^ Burstall R.M, MacQueen D.B, Sannella D.T. (1980) Hope: An Experimental Applicative Language. Conference Record of the 1980 LISP Conference, Stanford University, pp. 136-143.
  2. ^ Bailey, Roger (1 April 1990). Functional Programming with Hope. Ellis Horwood Series in Computers and Their Applications. Ellis Horwood Ltd.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference design was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ R.M. Burstall and J. Darlington. A transformation system for developing recursive programs. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, 24(1):44–67 (1977)
  5. ^ Hudak, Paul; Hughes, John; Peyton Jones, Simon; Wadler, Philip (2007-06-09). A history of Haskell: being lazy with class. ACM. pp. 12–1. doi:10.1145/1238844.1238856. ISBN 9781595937667. S2CID 52847907.