AliceLanguage

Last edit April 4, 2012
Not to be confused with the project defined at http://www.alice.org/ -- see AliceSoftware or SqueakAlice.

From <http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice/>, Wikified:

Alice is a FunctionalProgrammingLanguage based on Standard ML [SmlLanguage], extended with support for ConcurrentProgramming, DistributedProgramming, and ConstraintProgramming. Alice extends Standard ML with several new features:

  • Laziness: combining strict and transparent lazy functional programming [LazyEvaluation]
  • Futures: "logic variables" and concurrency [FutureValue]
  • HigherOrderModules: a more powerful module language
  • Components: platform-independence and type-safe dynamic loading of modules
  • Packages: integrating static with dynamic typing and first class modules
  • Pickling: higher-order and platform-independent, type-safe persistence
  • Constraints: solving combinatorical problems using constraints and programmable search

The Alice system is a powerful, open-source programming system featuring the following tools:

  • Interactive system: an interpreter-like interactive toplevel
  • Batch compiler: separate compilation
  • Static linker: type-safe bundling of components
  • Inspector: a tool for interactively inspecting data structures
  • Explorer: a tool for interactively investigating search problems
  • Gtk+: a binding for the Gnome toolkit GUI library

Alice builds on our experience with developing the Mozart system [MozartProgrammingSystem]. Previous versions of Alice were based on the Mozart VirtualMachine, and Alice programs could interoperate with OzLanguage. Alice 1.0 and later use the SeamVirtualMachine.

Be our guest on the Short Tour of Alice! <http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice/manual/tour.html>
<http://www.codepoetics.com/wiki/index.php?title=Topics:CTM_in_other_languages:Alice_ML> has some of the OzLanguage examples from ConceptsTechniquesAndModelsOfComputerProgramming transcribed into Alice.

I wish this language had more hype behind it, it has really nice ideas, and could probably even win back the OCaml converts to it's SMLish style.

CategoryProgrammingLanguage