PAL (programming language)

Rpal is a functional programming language which is related to the ML programming language.

RPAL is an acronym meaning Right Reference - Pedagogic Algorithmic Language . It is a subset of PAL, a language invented by Evans and Wozencraft in early 70's at MIT. for teaching programming language construction.

This language is used almost exclusivly by Dr. Manuel Bermudez of the Computer Engineering Department at the University of Florida as a means of both teaching the construction of programming languages, as well as causing students to experience a paradigm shift as they change from the imperative model to the functional model. Programs in this language can only be made up of a single expression (because the language does not offer a sequencing operator). The other notable operator that the language is missing is an assign operator. The only way to change a variable is to create a new binding for. This binding is permanent, and cannot ever be changed. The same name, however, may be rebound in a nested scope.

Language Specification

The following links are the specification of the language as presented by Dr Bermudez

• Introduction
• Lexical Grammar
• Parsing Grammar ( or String to Tree Transduction Grammar )
• Subtree Transformational Grammar

External links

A reference implementation in scheme was created in one day by Daniel Franke and can be found at its source forge project.

A working version of Dr. Bermudez's RPAL Interpreter (in the C programming language)is available via email from this kind student. Dr. Bermudez is very nice and will probably respond kindly to any requests for the original source code as well (he can be reached through his website.

This article is under development. Feel free to add more details about RPAL.