PAL (programming language)
RPAL FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE
- As most of the graduate computer students might know, there are 4 distinct paradigms into which almost all programming languages may be classified as belonging to ( i do not considering concurrent programming as a paradigm ( sorry if that sounded wrong.. as it fails to pose a paradigm block ). One of the four paradigms is what is called Functional Paradigm. To be really short, in functional programming, functions are the primary sources of power. This paradigm treats functions as first class objects meaning you can literally do whatever you want with functions ( from passing a function as a paramter to returning it as a return argument).
- RPAL which stands to represent what is called the Right Reference - Pedagogic Algorithmic Language is one such functional programming language. It is a subset of PAL, a language invented by Evans and Wozencraft in early 70's at MIT.
- Almost every computer science grad student is faced with the task of mastering this amazing language ( amazing as this is the first functional language that i am being exposed to and ofcourse not performance wise and certainly not memory wise or runtime complexity wise ) as a part of graduate studies at the CS Department in UF under Dr.Bermudez. The focus in this article is not on functional programming as such but on the specific RPAL Language as there seems to be a lack of resources on the net pertaining to this intellectual ancestor of many other functional programming languages.
Before proceeding further , the following links constitute a part of the concise and crisp book of RPAL that includes
- Lexical Grammar
- Parsing Grammar ( or String to Tree Transduction Grammar )
- Subtree Transformational Grammar
A working version of RPAL Interpreter is available with the author and the readers may contact the author to get a working version with the source code.
'This article is under development. Feel free to add more details about RPAL.'