Orwell (programming language) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Orwell is a small lazy

Lazy evaluation

In programming language theory, lazy evaluation or call-by-need is an evaluation strategy which delays the evaluation of an expression until the value of this is actually required and which also avoids repeated evaluations...

functional 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....

first released in 1984 by Philip Wadler

Philip Wadler

Philip Wadler is a computer scientist known for his contributions to programming language design and type theory. In particular, he has contributed to the theory behind functional programming and the use of monads in functional programming, the design of the purely functional language Haskell, and...

. Developed as a free alternative to Miranda, it was a forerunner of Haskell

Haskell (programming language)

Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing. It is named after logician Haskell Curry. In Haskell, "a function is a first-class citizen" of the programming language. As a functional programming language, the...

. It was one of the first programming languages to support list comprehensions and pattern matching

Pattern matching

In computer science, pattern matching is the act of checking some sequence of tokens for the presence of the constituents of some pattern. In contrast to pattern recognition, the match usually has to be exact. The patterns generally have the form of either sequences or tree structures...

.

The name is a tribute to George Orwell's book 1984.

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