Hello everybody,

I got a question. Is there anything like a verbose functional language
that attempts to be easily readable?

What I am looking for would be something that looks kind of like
smalltalk, with an emphasis on easy to read code, but fully functional
with immutable data structures and a powerful type system.

I find that many people are confused by the very compact syntax of
existing functional languages such as haskell and ocaml and therefore
miss out on the big advantages of these languages such as referential
transparency.

regards,

Rüdiger

On Dec 2, 4:04 pm, "Rüdiger Klaehn" lambda-computing.com> wrote:

As a beginner, I find SML easily readable.

Michele Simionato

Rüdiger Klaehn wrote:

In case you don't insist on purity and can live with dynamic typing, try
Scheme and Common Lisp, especially Common Lisp or ISLISP.

Pascal

Pascal Costanza a écrit :

In article <4752e6f3$0$12394$426a74cc@news.free.fr>,
Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:

Rüdiger Klaehn schrieb:

This is possible in any FPL, by using higher-order functions.

In most cases, that's because the code is getting more compact than what
people are used to.

Erlang is somewhat verbose, but rather "non-English".

Dunno otherwise. Clean, maybe?

Regards,
Jo

Rüdiger Klaehn wrote:

Are they? I always find it difficult to convince people of the practical
utility of referential transparency. OTOH, few people who see an elegant
compact Haskell expression deny that it is a great advantage to express
things so concisely (that is, after they get it explained and understand
what it means). I wonder how a more verbose syntax could improve on the
readability of e.g.

map (+1)

for a function which increments all elements in a list.

Anyway if you are looking for something with a Java-like syntax, take a look
at Scala.

Cheers
Ben

"Rüdiger Klaehn" lambda-computing.com> writes:

Not me. There are a lot of very good things about SML,
but I find the syntax to be a big stumbling block.
Maybe I'd get used to it if I programmed in SML a lot.

Bruno Desthuilliers writes:

I can memorize the meaning of car and cdr -- that's not a big hindrance
to me (although I think head and tail would be more civilized).

But most Lisp code uses pretty readable (longish) names for things,
which I like.

I'm not a huge fan of "Lots of Incredibly Silly Parentheses",
but the Lisp-style syntax seems far superior to the
syntax of ML-style languages. At least in Lisp I can tell
where the end of each thing is (perhaps with the help of
a fancy editor, but at worst, by counting parens).
And Lisp syntax has the advantage of being simple.
No need to memorize precedence rules and the like.

- Bob

In article registered.motzarella.org>,
Ben Franksen wrote: