FL is a programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 created at the IBM Almaden Research Center by John Backus

John Backus

John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form , the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax.He also did research in...

, John Williams

John Williams

John Towner Williams is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career spanning almost six decades, he has composed some of the most recognizable film scores in the history of motion pictures, including the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T...

, and Edward Wimmers in 1989.

FL was designed as a successor of Backus' earlier FP language

FP (programming language)

FP is a programming language created by John Backus to support the function-level programming paradigm...

, providing specific support for what Backus termed function-level programming

Function-level programming

In computer science, function-level programming refers to one of the two contrasting programming paradigms identified by John Backus in his work on programs as mathematical objects, the other being value-level programming....

.

FL is a dynamically typed strict functional programming

Functional programming

In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast to the imperative programming style, which emphasizes changes in state...

 language with throw and catch exception semantics much like in ML. Each function has an implicit history argument which is used for doing things like strictly functional input/output

Input/output

In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...

 (I/O), but is also used for linking to C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 code. For doing optimization, there exists a type-system which is an extension of Hindley–Milner type inference.

Many of the language’s innovative, arguably important ideas have now been implemented in Kenneth E. Iverson

Kenneth E. Iverson

Kenneth Eugene Iverson was a Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the APL programming language in 1962. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 for his contributions to mathematical notation and programming language theory...

’s J language

J (programming language)

The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Kenneth E. Iverson and Roger Hui, is a synthesis of APL and the FP and FL function-level languages created by John Backus....

.

External links

• The FL Project: Design of a Functional Language (postscript)