Article

Free access

The essence of functional programming

Author:

Philip WadlerAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '92: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

Pages 1 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/143165.143169

Published: 01 February 1992 Publication History

Abstract

This paper explores the use monads to structure functional programs. No prior knowledge of monads or category theory is required.

Monads increase the ease with which programs may be modified. They can mimic the effect of impure features such as exceptions, state, and continuations; and also provide effects not easily achieved with such features. The types of a program reflect which effects occur.

The first section is an extended example of the use of monads. A simple interpreter is modified to support various extra features: error messages, state, output, and non-deterministic choice. The second section describes the relation between monads and the continuation-passing style. The third section sketches how monads are used in a compiler for Haskell that is written in Haskell.

References

[1]

A. Appel and T. Jim, Continuation-passing, closure-passing style. In 16'th Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Austin, Texas; ACM, January 1989.

Digital Library

[2]

R. Bird and P. Wadler, Introduction to Functional Programming. Prentice Hall, 1987.

Digital Library

[3]

O. Danvy and A. Filinski, Abstracting control. In Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, Nice, France; ACM, June 1990.

Digital Library

[4]

B. Duba, R. Harper, and D. MacQueen, Typing first-class continuations in ML. In 18'th Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Orlando, Florida; ACM, January 1991.

Digital Library

[5]

J. Guzmgn and e. Hudak, Single-threaded polymorphic lambda calculus. In Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; IEEE, June 1990.

[6]

D.K. Gifford and J. M. Lucassen, Integrating functional and imperative programming. In Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, 28-39, Cambridge, Massachusetts; ACM, August 1986.

Digital Library

[7]

P. Hancock, A type checker. Chapter 9 of Simon Peyton Jones, The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages, Prentice Hall, 1987.

[8]

P. Hudak, S. Peyton Jones and P. Wadler, editors, Report on the Programming Language Haskell: Version 1.1. Technical report, Yale University and Glasgow University, August 1991.

[9]

P. Jouvelot and D. Gifford, Algebraic reconstruction of types and effects. In 18'th A CM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Orlando, Florida, January 1991.

Digital Library

[10]

J. Lambek and P. Scott, Introduction to Higher Order Categorical Logic, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Digital Library

[11]

S. Mac Lane, Categories for the Working athematician, Springer-Verlag, 1971.

[12]

E. Moggi, Computational lamb da- calculus and monads. In Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, Asilomar, California; IEEE, June 1989. (A longer version is available as a technical report from the University of Edinburgh.)

Digital Library

[13]

E. Moggi, An abstract view of programming languges. Course notes, University of Edinburgh.

[14]

R. Milner, M. Tofte, and R. Harper, The definition of Standard ML. MIT Press, 1990.

Digital Library

[15]

L. C. Paulson, ML for the Working Programmer. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Digital Library

[16]

N. Perry, Hope+C, a continuation extension for Hope+. Imperial College, Department of Computing, Technical report IC/FPR/LANG/2.5.1/21, November 1987.

[17]

G. Plotkin, Call-by-name, call-by-value, and the )i-calculus. Theoretical Computer Science, 1:125-159, 1975.

[18]

J. Rees and W. Clinger (eds.), The revised3 report on the algorithmic language Scheme. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 21(12):37-79, 1986.

Digital Library

[19]

J. Reynolds, Definitional interpreters for higher-order programming languages. In 25'th ACM National Conference, 717-740, 1972.

Digital Library

[20]

J. Reynolds, Using category theory to design implicit conversion and generic opin N. Jones, editor, Semantics- Directed Compiler Generation, 211-258, Berlin; LNCS 94, Springer-Verlag, 1980.

Digital Library

[21]

J. Reynolds, The essence of Algol. In de Bakker and van Vliet, editors, Algorithmic Languages, 345-372, North Holland, 1981.

[22]

J. Reynolds, Preliminary design of the programming language Forsythe. Carnegie Mellon University technical report CMU- CS-88-159, June 1988.

[23]

J. C. Reynolds, Syntactic control of interference, part II. In International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming, 1989.

Digital Library

[24]

J. Reynolds, The coherrence of languages with intersection types. In International Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Software, Sendai, Japan, LNCS, Springer Verlag, September 1991.

Digital Library

[25]

M. Spivey, A functional theory of exceptions. Science of Computer Programming, 14(1):25-42, June 1990.

Digital Library

[26]

V. Swarup, U. S. Reddy, and E. Ireland, Assignments for applicative languages. In Conference on Functional Programm~ng Languages and Computer Architecture, Cambridge, Massachusetts; LNCS 523, Springer Verlag, August 1991.

Digital Library

[27]

G.L. Steele, Jr. and G. Sussman, Lambda, the ultimate imperative. MIT, AI Memo 353, March 1976.

Digital Library

[28]

D.A. Turner, An overview of Miranda. In D. A. Turner, editor, Research Topics in Functional Programming. Addison Wesley, 1990.

Digital Library

[29]

P. Wadler, How to replace failure by a list of successes. Conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture, Nancy, France; LNCS 201, Springer-Verlag, September 1985.

Digital Library

[30]

P. WadIer, Comprehending monads. In Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, Nice, France; ACM, June 1990.

Digital Library

[31]

Is there a use for linear logic? Conference on Partial Evaluation and Semantics- Based Program Manipulation (PEPM), New Haven, Connecticut; ACM, June 1991.

Digital Library

Cited By

Umatani SHong JPark J(2024)Lightweight DSL for Describing Extensible Transition SystemsProceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3605098.3636025(1122-1131)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605098.3636025
SEKIYAMA TTSUKADA TIGARASHI A(2024)Signature restriction for polymorphic algebraic effectsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682400005434Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796824000054
White JHays SFu QSpencer-Smith JSchmidt D(2024)ChatGPT Prompt Patterns for Improving Code Quality, Refactoring, Requirements Elicitation, and Software DesignGenerative AI for Effective Software Development10.1007/978-3-031-55642-5_4(71-108)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55642-5_4
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The essence of functional programming
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Interpreters
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Functional languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory
    1. Formalisms
      1. Algebraic language theory
  2. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program semantics
      1. Algebraic semantics

Recommendations

Functional programming in Haskell

This tutorial will focus on functional programming in Haskell, a very high-level language which provides a unique "bird's-eye view" on many programming problems. Like other modern functional languages, Haskell derives its power from higher-order ...
Functional programming languages for verification tools: a comparison of Standard ML and Haskell

We compare Haskell with Standard ML as programming languages for verification tools based on our experience developing the verification platform Truth in Haskell and the Edinburgh Concurrency Workbench (CWB) in Standard ML. We review not only technical ...
The Illinois functional programming interpreter
SIGPLAN '87: Papers of the Symposium on Interpreters and interpretive techniques

The Illinois Functional Programming (IFP) language is a modified version of Backus' FP(1). IFP has the same side-effect free combinator style of Backus FP, while introducing an ALGOL-like syntax and structure. While IFP superficially appears to be an ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

POPL '92: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

February 1992

376 pages

ISBN:0897914538

DOI:10.1145/143165

Chairman:
Ravi Sethi
AT&T Bell Labs., Murray Hill, NJ

Copyright © 1992 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 February 1992

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

POPL92

Sponsor:

POPL92: 19th ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 19 - 22, 1992

New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA

Acceptance Rates

POPL '92 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 204 submissions, 15%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 824 of 4,130 submissions, 20%

Upcoming Conference

POPL '25

Sponsor:
sigplan

The 52nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 19 - 25, 2025

Denver , CO , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

437
Total Citations
View Citations
8,031
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1,284
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)95

Reflects downloads up to 11 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Umatani SHong JPark J(2024)Lightweight DSL for Describing Extensible Transition SystemsProceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3605098.3636025(1122-1131)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3605098.3636025
SEKIYAMA TTSUKADA TIGARASHI A(2024)Signature restriction for polymorphic algebraic effectsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682400005434Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796824000054
White JHays SFu QSpencer-Smith JSchmidt D(2024)ChatGPT Prompt Patterns for Improving Code Quality, Refactoring, Requirements Elicitation, and Software DesignGenerative AI for Effective Software Development10.1007/978-3-031-55642-5_4(71-108)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55642-5_4
Bourgeat TClester IErbsen AGruetter SSingh PWright AChlipala A(2023)Flexible Instruction-Set Semantics via Abstract Monads (Experience Report)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36078337:ICFP(108-124)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607833
Bach Poulsen Cvan der Rest C(2023)Hefty Algebras: Modular Elaboration of Higher-Order Algebraic EffectsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35712557:POPL(1801-1831)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571255
de'Liguoro UTreglia R(2023)From semantics to types: The case of the imperative λ-calculusTheoretical Computer Science10.1016/j.tcs.2023.114082973(114082)Online publication date: Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2023.114082
Garcia de Oliveira AJaskelioff MVieira de Melo A(2022)On Structuring Functional Programs with Monoidal ProfunctorsElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.360.7360(134-150)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.360.7
Khayam ANoizet LSchmitt A(2022)A Faithful Description of ECMAScript AlgorithmsProceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming10.1145/3551357.3551381(1-14)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551357.3551381
Steimann F(2022)Containerless Plurals: Separating Number from Type in Object-Oriented ProgrammingACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/352763544:4(1-56)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3527635
Liu SLi XGeng TZuckerman SGaudiot J(2022)Programming Autonomous Machines : Special Session Paper2022 International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT)10.1109/EMSOFT55006.2022.00018(24-33)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/EMSOFT55006.2022.00018
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents