Miranda
(From the Latin for "admirable", also the heroine
of Shakespeare's Tempest) A lazy purely functional
programming language and interpreter designed by David
Turner at the University of Kent in the early 1980s. It is
sold by his company, Research Software Limited. It combines
the main features of KRC and SASL with strong typing
similar to that of ML. Implemented for Unix by Allan
Grimeley, Computer Lab., UKC. There is also a version that
runs on Intel 80386 and above IBM PCs under Linux.
It features terse syntax using the offside rule for
indentation. The type of an expression is inferred from the
source by the compiler but explicit type declarations are
also allowed. Nested pattern-matching, list
comprehensions, modules. Operator sections rather than
lambda abstractions. User types are algebraic, and in early
versions could be constrained by laws. Implemented by SKI
combinator reduction. The KAOS operating system is written
entirely in Miranda.
E-mail: .
Translators from Miranda to Haskell (mira2hs) and to LML
(mira2lml) are available, (ftp://www.foldoc.org/pub/).
Non-commercial near-equivalents of Miranda include Miracula
and Orwell.
["Miranda: A Non Strict Functional Language with Polymorphic
Types", D.A. Turner, in Functional Programming Languages and
Computer Architecture, LNCS 201, Springer 1985].
["Functional Programming with Miranda", Ian Holyer, Pitman
Press 0-273-03453-7].
(1997-08-01)
Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03)
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