bpm@ucsbcsl.UUCP (Bertrand Meyer) (01/25/85)
A graduate student working under my supervision, Greg de Haan, is doing a Master's thesis on the topic "AN INVESTIGATION OF FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING". He is in particular exploring the theoretical issues underpinning functional programming and functional languages, and the practical ways in which programs have been written in these languages. As part of this work, Greg will perform a static analysis of existing programs in functional languages; the aim is to determine how the languages are used in practice (as opposed to how they are described in papers and textbooks). We are thus looking for a significant body of programs to analyze. The essential criterion is that the programs should not be exercizes or language experiments: they should (attempt to) perform something useful, be it theorem proving, pattern recognition, robot manipulation, formal reasoning, natural language processing, compiling, or anything else. In other words, we are looking for programs written in a functional language, where the functional language is a tool for writing the program, rather than being itself the subject of study. At this point our definition of "functional" is fairly broad and includes such things as Lisp and its variants, FP, Prolog, dataflow languages, etc. - anything which departs from the traditional procedural approach. All program contributors will receive a copy of our results, the thesis, and any paper we write based on these results. Contributors will of course be acknowledged in these publications. On the other hand, the published results will be statistical, and we will not refer to a specific program by its name without the explicit authorization of the program's authors. We are thus requesting authors of programs which conform to the above criteria to submit their programs for analysis. At this point, please do not mail me the programs themselves, but rather a short description (name, purpose, language used, approximate length, actual usage), so that we can determine whether we can do something useful with them. My net addresses are given below; I have had some troubles with electronic mail in the past, so I am giving alternate routes in case the normal UUCP route fails. Please mention this request to other functional programming fans who may not be on this net. We thank the community in advance. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bertrand Meyer UUCP: ...!ucbvax!ucsbcsl!bpm Visiting Professor CSNET: bpm@ucsb.CSnet-relay Department of Computer Science ARPANET:ucsbcsl!bpm@BERKELEY or University of California bpm%ucsb@csnet-relay (usually slower) Santa Barbara, Ca. 93106 Telephone (805) 961-4385 or 961-4321 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------